Southend Hospital
Debate between Roberta Blackman-Woods and Shabana Mahmood(6 years ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) for his intervention. I know that a lot of work has been done in Manchester. I will come on to some of the public health issues. He is right to raise public health concerns. There are, of course, public health duties on local authorities, and the public health risks relating to shisha are not well understood and publicised. He is absolutely right that much more awareness is needed. I congratulate Manchester for the good work it has done in this area.
The common life of those residents and the community they created, which they love and have thrived in for all these years, was being ruined. Some of those stalwart residents—the absolute backbone of the community—told me that they wanted to leave and were desperate to move out. In fact, they most wanted my help with council housing transfers. I thought that was one of the saddest things, because those people are the lifeblood of the area. If they move out, we will lose something much more profound in the community. It was all because they simply could not tolerate the daily misery they were facing because of the shisha venue.
As people became more vocal with their complaints—I took up the issues and worked with the council and the police, who were doing their best to manage the fallout from the venue opening near my residents, and there was more media coverage in the Birmingham Post and the Birmingham Mail—residents became worried about reprisals from patrons of the venue. Suddenly, it became much more of a hot topic. Things then took a more serious and frightening turn, because gun violence and other serious crime was taking place. People were up in arms but also terrified. I was shocked that almost overnight a community could be ruined by a shisha place opening.
As the local Member of Parliament, I initially treated this as a policing matter. It is interesting that other parliamentarians and council leaders have tended to raise it with Home Office Ministers as a policing issue. I, too, talked to the police. We thought about having more policing patrols and possible interventions, but eventually I had to conclude that the law itself makes things complicated in this area. My thought was, “Just take away the shisha licence,” because that is the business model on which the premises are based—take it away and they will not have a business and will soon move on—but of course there is no licence for shisha.
In the case of Arabian Nites, it took a couple of serious incidents involving gun discharges—one discharge ricocheted and hit a passer-by—before the police could apply for a closure order under antisocial behaviour rules. Such closure orders are temporary and the one for Arabian Nites was for only three months. The venue has not reopened, but it is free to do so once it has met the new conditions.
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that under the Licensing Act 2003 it should not be so difficult to get premises closed down for antisocial behaviour and other breaches of the legislation?
Shabana Mahmood
My hon. Friend, the shadow Minister, is absolutely right: the process is too difficult and onerous. I have a copy of the documentation put together at huge cost in time and resource by the police in support of the application for a closure order. It is more than 100 pages long—I was trying to print it before coming to the Chamber so that I could show it to everyone, but my printer broke—given the amount of work and number of witness statements required of police officers.
In the first case against Arabian Nites, the police did not get the closure order and had to apply a second time. Meanwhile, my residents who live with that place directly opposite their homes are terrified of gun violence, of stepping outside late at night and even of taking their kids to the school around the corner. The regime is too onerous, and to rely simply on existing police powers is not good enough. I have nothing but praise, by the way, for the way in which the police have tried to engage with the issue. They have done their best with the avenues open to them.
In Birmingham, a total of three such establishments have been subject to closure orders. All three happen to be in my constituency: Arabian Nites, which I have mentioned; Cloud Nine, which was closed after the suspected sale of laughing gas to children as young as nine, and following breaches of fire safety and venue capacity limits; and the Emperors Lounge, which was closed after a murder was linked to the premises, but which has since reopened after a three-month closure order.
As the law stands, shisha smoking is subject to the ban on smoking in public places, alongside all other smoking in the UK—it is subject to the same rules. Shisha is a tobacco product, so it is subject to the same rules that apply to regular tobacco, in particular the ban on sales to those under 18. When it comes to licensing legislation, however, the Licensing Act covers only the sale of alcohol and certain forms of regulated entertainment. Shisha bars or lounges do not require a licence under regulation unless they sell alcohol or have other regulated entertainment under the 2003 Act.
Some establishments sell alcohol. Arabian Nites was selling alcohol, which was one of the bases on which the police and the council were eventually able to take action, but Cloud Nine and the Emperors Lounge did not have licences for the sale of alcohol, instead falling within the other regulated activities under the Licensing Act. No single agency or piece of statutory legislation regulates shisha activities. If serious incidents occur—shootings or serious violence such as I have had in my constituency—the police may apply for the powers available to them under antisocial behaviour rules, such as a three-month closure order, as we have seen in Birmingham. However, that process takes a lot of time and effort.
Furthermore, many premises will fight their corner with what is available to them through the legal system. It is fair to say, too, that many will do whatever they can to frustrate the legal process, keeping the thing running for as long as possible in order to beat everyone down and evade the enforcement action being sought.