Not only is additional entertainment permission still unable to deal with noise concerns, historically this requirement has actually made the situation worse and has led directly to the present situation.

You could never obtain licensing permission to enable you to make noise. However, in practice that was exactly what happened when premises paid the local authority for the old PEL. As some LAs received considerable income from the fees, the LA had a vested interest in finding ways to allow any permitted entertainment, even where it was clear that it was constituting a real noise concern. Thus the approach to complaints was different to the one we see now.

One of the sensible intentions of The Licensing Act 2003 was to do away with local authorities being able to set the level of their own fees but without the vested interest involved in enabling live music - it is difficult to see how live music can survive in our pubs (even non-amplified music).

As we can see from the reports in this thread, if it survives through the Planning and Licensing stages it will fall foul of the Environmental Protection legislation. All these processes are encouraging complaints which the local authority members (as advised by their employees) seem to think they are duty bound to address. Even when, as in the following example, there is one complaint compared to six in favour!

Lydia and Steven also refute claims by Mrs Ashley to be acting on behalf of other residents and will provide the committee with a petition from six nearby residents in favour of the changes.

Council officials say there have been no other objections to the changes but the committee must decide the issue since they have been unable to "negotiate away" the comments raised by Mrs Ashley.