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Booze laws ‘handing power to the people’

Law gives objectors opportunity to air their views

CULTURE minister Tessa Jowell has told the New Journal that she is confident new licensing laws are handing power to residents.
In an interview at the Labour Party’s conference in Brighton on Tuesday, Ms Jowell (pictured) said that large numbers of objectors were winning concessions from pub’s licensing applications, claiming that as proof that the new regime was working.
Under new rules, fixed opening hours have been scrapped and hundreds of bars have inundated Camden Council with requests to stay open later.
Ms Jowell, a former Camden Councillor, said: “The response that we are getting around the country is that residents are having a say on licensing applications. Figures show that 95 per cent of applications in which residents have made objections, there has been some sort of concessions. This might be rules that CCTV must be used on a premises or a restriction on what time customers can enter a premises.”
Ms Jowell lives in Kentish Town and is married to David Mills, brother of Camden’s finance supremo Councillor John Mills. She has been criticised in the borough for ignoring appeals from the Town Hall to make changes to the new rules.
On one occasion during a long campaign, a senior Labour councillor said talking to her was like talking to a brick wall.
She added: “The law gives residents the opportunity to give their view.”
Ms Jowell’s satisfaction with the law, however, will jar with residents who have had to devoted hours of their free time to fight for the concessions and stem the flow of late licence bids from pubs in the area.
But she added: “We have to wait and see how the new hours will work when they come in November but this law was never about 24 hour drinking. Anybody who says that it is misrepresenting it. It is about protecting the public and protecting young people.”



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