Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the adequacy of licensing laws for supporting rural and community pubs.

Hospitality businesses are vital to our communities, both in town centres and in rural areas. As well as providing local jobs and supporting local supply chains, they help create places where people want to live, work, visit and invest.

No assessment has been made specifically of the link between licensing laws and supporting rural and community pubs, however a wider reform programme is underway following the report of a Licensing Taskforce and consultation with stakeholders over the past year. The Government aims to support all hospitality businesses, by developing reforms which lead to a more responsive and enabling licensing system for hospitality and leisure businesses that also protects and safeguards communities.

As part of the licensing reforms programme a Call for Evidence closed in November with over 2,000 responses to a range of questions about changes that could be made to the licensing regime. Following that we published a new National Licensing Policy Framework (NLPF) for the hospitality sector, which set how the Licensing Act should be applied to support the growth of hospitality businesses and highlights examples of good practice.