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Conditions request

Do I need to vary my licence?

Q:  I run a busy pub which trades into the early hours of the morning.  I recently had an email from a Local Authority Licensing Officer bemoaning the fact that my licence has very few conditions upon it and clearly wanting me to undertake a minor variation to add such things as CCTV, a refusals register and an incident log.  There is a vague reference to “Police concerns” within the correspondence and I do not know what to do.  I do not want them to review my premises licence so wonder whether I should agree to the variation?

A:  These situations are always quite tricky.  Whatever way you look at it the addition of conditions should be for a reason (the test is whether or not they are “appropriate”) and not just because the Local Authority and / or Police think that your licence is a little “light on conditions”.  They ought to be able to back-up their request with actual evidence of, for example, crimes which have gone undetected due to lack of CCTV footage.  You should seek a meeting with relevant officers and try to determine exactly what evidence they have of problems to justify their request.  You may decide that their request is worthy of a minor variation simply because you are happy to undertake what they want in any event and you do not want to risk a review.  On the other hand you may wish to stand your ground and see if they can actually justify a review application with the necessary evidence to back it up.

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