A hard act to follow: assessing the consequences of licensing reform in England and Wales
2007; Wiley; Volume: 102; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1360-0443.2006.01696.x
ISSN1360-0443
Autores Tópico(s)Crime Patterns and Interventions
ResumoAddictionVolume 102, Issue 2 p. 177-180 Free Access A hard act to follow: assessing the consequences of licensing reform in England and Wales PHIL HADFIELD, PHIL HADFIELD Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. E-mail: p.m.hadfield@leeds.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author PHIL HADFIELD, PHIL HADFIELD Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. E-mail: p.m.hadfield@leeds.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 15 January 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2006.01696.xCitations: 12AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat In November 2005 a long-awaited transformation of the licensing system in England and Wales occurred, following implementation of the Licensing Act 2003. Under the Act, licensed businesses are required to demonstrate that their operations will not undermine any of the following statutory objectives: • the prevention of crime and disorder; • public safety; • the prevention of public nuisance; and • the protection of children from harm. Another potential statutory objective—included, for instance, in new licensing legislation for Scotland—is omitted from the Act, and specifically disavowed in its accompanying Guidance [1, pp. 65, 92]: public health. This omission is notable, given the rises in long-term public ill-health associated with alcohol that have so alarmed sections of the British medical community (e.g. [2-4]). Despite evidence linking growth in consumption to a range of increased harms, the Act sought to liberalize availability by permitting extended hours for licensed retailers [5]. Policy development appears to have been driven chiefly by the Department for Culture Media and Sport and its attempts to combine leisure industry facilitation with certain checks and balances to appease police, local government and Home Office opinion. Thus, the Guidance tells us much about the control of young people in public spaces and crime and disorder in and around public houses and clubs, but very little about less visible and politically sensitive issues such as drink-driving, alcohol-related accidents and domestic violence. Evaluation of the Act is made difficult by the fact that, in many urban entertainment districts, processes of liberalization have been in motion for some years. Such areas therefore inherited extended licensing hours obtained under the old licensing regime. I describe elsewhere how political, commercial and legal pressures conspired to bring about historical shifts in regulation wherein Public Entertainment Licences were matched routinely with Special Hours Certificates [6, ch. 3]. With a range of licensing arrangements, allowing for the sale of alcohol up to 2 a.m. (3 a.m. in Central London), and the potential for licensed entertainment until dawn, Britain's night-time high streets were, pre-November 2005, far removed from the 11 p.m. curfew zones of media mythology. The concentration of alcohol-related crime in urban entertainment zones has been well documented and may be linked to the broad range of social, economic and regulatory factors which continue to propel the fluid evolution of established—some would say ‘saturated’—local alcohol markets. It is to such areas and their associated ‘problems’ that the objectives of the Act are most obviously addressed. In exploring how one might assess the impact of the Act, the following paragraphs will take this narrow skewing of alcohol policy at face value. CRIME AND DISORDER Given the Act's strong emphasis on crime and disorder, the measurement of crime patterns would seem the most salient starting-point for evaluation. The Home Office report, Crime in England and Wales 2005/06[7], which examines the proportion of violent offences and criminal damage occurring over the period October 2004–March 2006, concludes that levels remain static: ‘The data shows no indication of a rise in the overall level of offences, or a shift in the timing of offences as a result of the change in the opening hours of licensed premises’ (p. 77). This statement raises many questions but answers none. Important methodological issues remain unexplained and moot; for example, the 23 police forces providing data are unnamed and we are not told how, or why, they were selected; the exercise limits its analyses to offences occurring before 2 a.m., an extraordinary failing given that many nightlife areas now experience a peak of crime during the 2.00–3.30 a.m. period. The report tantalizes with the promise of ‘more detailed results . . . in due course’ (p. 77), but fails to explain why methods and data remain immune to public scrutiny. It is clear that we have yet to see definitive research evidence regarding any shifting patterns of crime and disorder associated with the Act. Despite making a number of assurances in response to pertinent questions in the House of Lords, the government do not appear to have devoted any specific resources to independent evaluation of the Act through the usual processes of competitive tender. (See Lord Avebury at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldhansrd/vo040608/text/40608-29.htm and the government response at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldhansrd/vo040608/text/40608-31.htm.) Other countries (principally Australia and New Zealand) lead the way in evaluating the effects ofchanges in licensing arrangements using such indices as patterns of drunk-driving and alcohol-related traffic accidents (e.g. [8-10]), rates of alcohol-attributable mortality [11] and violent assault [12], police work-tasks and hospital admissions data [13]. Comparable studies in Britain have thus far been conspicuously absent. In order to conduct meaningful evaluation and monitoring in England and Wales, case study locations would need to be chosen with care, as there are often important local variations. An all-encompassing nation-wide approach may be singularly inappropriate given that, in practice, some areas may have experienced little increase in drinking hours. For example, the established late-night culture of our urban high streets has meant that it has been largely the public house sector, rather than the operators of bars, clubs and other hybrid young persons' venues (YPVs) who have applied to extend their hours. Local market conditions, and the position of individual business interests within them, would appear to exert a major influence over the decision to trade late; evidence suggesting that, nationally, only 42% of public houses have so far obtained later opening under the new regime [14]. Twenty-four-hour licences remain largely the domain of supermarkets, petrol stations and other off-sale retailers. The potential for such outlets to contribute to any ‘problems’ associated with public access to cheap alcohol throughout the night has yet to be explored. Some local authorities and magistrates continue to resist the pressure from government and commercial interests by exercising a restrictive caution in licensing matters, while others embrace liberalization or swing from one stance to the other. Clearly, there is a need to select case study areas in which a quantifiable change in availability (through hours of trading and/or number of outlets) can be demonstrated. Shifts in consumer behaviour are apparent in some areas, with patrons deciding to begin and end their nights out at a later hour, or choosing to remain in community public houses and visiting nightlife areas less frequently. Any adequate evaluation of the Act would need to monitor such changes in ‘human ecology’ very carefully, using spatial and temporal analyses of crime data (such as geographical information systems: GIS) to examine associated crime patterns in urban centres and along public transport corridors. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods would be required. Quantitative analysis might be used to construct a baseline of crime and disorder patterns in and around licensed premises prior to the introduction of extended trading hours. Appropriate data sources would be police-recorded crime and calls for service (incident data/999 calls), together with data held by licensed premises. It would be apposite to examine any trends in the distribution of incidents; for example, whether ‘hot spots’ for assault had been spatially or temporally displaced following implementation of the Act, or whether any significant differences could be detected in the number of incidents occurring within, or immediately outside, particular premises. Qualitative fieldwork would also need to be conducted in case study areas in order to account for any trends in the prevalence of crime and disorder that may not be explicable from the statistical data set alone. This would involve conducting interviews with key personnel and periods of participant observation in order to examine localized trends in consumer behaviour, the operating practices of licensed premises, the capacity of transport services and location of fast-food outlets. It would also be necessary to understand what specific policing strategies and other crime prevention initiatives were currently being used and for how long they had been applied. Extensions in licensing hours are likely to have resource implications for a range of public service providers, including the police and other emergency services, transport, cleansing, parking enforcement, environmental health and licensing inspection personnel. Fluctuations in demand could be monitored, together with any shifts in the pattern of violence and other forms of criminal victimization sustained by such workers in the course of their night-time duties. Hospital accident and emergency (A&E) department admissions and ambulance service callouts are important indicators of alcohol-related injury. Research by Drummond and colleagues (cited in [15, p. 48]) suggests that as many as 70% of those attending A&E departments between midnight and 5 a.m. are suffering from the effects of drink. Moreover, a large proportion of assaults resulting in medical treatment are never reported to the police, making health care professionals an important source of additional data. Such information is obtained typically by means of an assault patient questionnaire, as developed by Goodwin & Shepherd with the Home Office [16]. These tools can be used to collect brief information about drinking habits and the places and times in which injuries are sustained. In evaluating the Act, these findings might be compared to data gathered before licensing reform, or to evidence from areas where little or no variation in hours has occurred. To apply such approaches is not, of course, to imply that alcohol is ‘causing’ crime in any straightforward manner, but merely to trace correlations between trends in licensing, human activity and the distribution of criminal events and other forms of social harm in space and time. The need to go beyond traditional sources of crime data is most apparent in relation to the associated measurement of public nuisance. PUBLIC NUISANCE The issue of public nuisance brings us to the question of quality of life for residential communities affected by the night-time economy (NTE). ‘Public nuisance’ is not defined in the Act or its accompanying guidance, but is generally used to refer to a cluster of relatively ‘low-level’ phenomena that are extremely difficult to measure with accuracy, and consequently to quantify in terms of impact. Acute noise incidents, criminal damage, littering and fouling (that is, generally, urination or vomiting in public places) are routine occurrences in nightlife areas and may be associated with the combination of significant levels of alcohol consumption and the volume of people attracted to, and remaining within, such areas during night-time hours. TOWARDS LOCAL AREA PROFILING Attention to human ecology creates new opportunities for area profiling within which traditional sources of crime data may be triangulated with a variety of ‘trace measures’. Such traces ‘are “things” produced by individuals or groups of individuals’ which may be used as ‘an indicator of some form of social behaviour’[17, p. 161]. Patterns of public nuisance may correlate with those of crime; being traced, for example, by the temporal and spatial mapping of noise complaints, accidental injuries, litter, fouling, vandalism, broken glass, verbal abuse and intimidation of night-workers, together with the testimonies of local residents. Some researchers are convinced that otherwise minor increases in ‘antisocial behaviour’ in neighbourhoods can dramatically influence patterns of more ‘serious’ offending (e.g. [18]). Tracing the rich minutiae of every-night life may permit areas under ‘stress’ to be identified via the development of routine environmental profiling tools. Profiling data, published at regular intervals, would provide an evidential basis which might inform the evaluation of licensing, planning, policing, and transport policies, together with other forms of intervention. Such approaches are in their infancy and robust and sustainable local strategies for the NTE remain an aspiration. CONCLUSION: A THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE It is inevitable that the introduction of a radically reformed licensing system for England and Wales will produce a broad range of short-, medium- and long-term impacts, many of which currently remain obscure. In responding to the changes wrought by this new era, it is essential that local and national alcohol strategies be informed by solid empirical evidence. The challenge of quenching this thirst for knowledge falls upon the research community; a task made harder by the British government's lack of transparency in relation to the crime figures released so far and their apparent unwillingness to fund rigorous and independent evaluation. References 1 Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). Guidance Issued Under Section 182 of the Licensing Act 2003. London: DCMS; 2004. Google Scholar 2 Academy of Medical Sciences. Calling Time: the Nation's Drinking as a Major Health Issue. London: Academy of Medical Sciences; 2004. 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