Alcohol Licensing (Coronavirus) (Regulatory Easements) (Amendment) Regulations 2022

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 General Committees

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I welcome the Minister to his place. The Opposition will not oppose the extension under the regulations, just as we did not oppose the original regulations introduced last year.

As everyone will understand, and as the explanatory note explains, the regulations

“provide automatic extensions of premises licences”

following off-sales, and

“apply temporary conditions to licences where there is a pre-existing permission for off-sales, to enable those premises to operate in the same ways as those granted the new permission”.

When the original regulations were introduced, we debated whether they would have an impact on antisocial behaviour, noise and other aspects. I am pleased to hear that the Minister has spoken to the National Police Chiefs’ Council and that it has not seen any increase in those crimes. I note that there has been no full impact assessment of the extension in the regulations. Has any information been gathered from other quarters about antisocial behaviour, noise or other issues that may have occurred because of the extension in the alcohol allowance?

The other question that we will probably come to next year is whether the extension might become permanent. It would be interesting to know whether the Minister thinks, as the National Police Chiefs’ Council has seen no problems with it, that the provision will become something that businesses will want going forward. Obviously, that is problematic on one level, because we do not want covid laws to become permanent, but there might be a business case to be made for keeping them. I do not know whether he has had any thoughts on that yet, but we are happy to support today’s regulations.

Question put and agreed to.