In the many pubs which can now serve alcohol well past 11pm - all non-amplified live music will still require additional entertainment licensing permission if it to continue past 11pm - on grounds of noise? The scapegoating of live music for no purpose other than to enable alcohol to be served, is set to continue.

There is an opportunity here to remove the link created by the last Govt between the licensing of alcohol and the licensing of live music and doing it in one licence. This opportunity should be taken.

This would allow the controls that are required to address the problems associated with alcohol and would enable the benefits that live music undoubtable brings.

Our Govt and Peers seem finally to have recognised these benefits but just seem unable to move far enough away from long-engrained assumptions to do what is requred.

There are Home Office proposals which are intended to deal with alcohol related problems but will also affect live music, as the same licence and procedure is in place for both activities.

Lord Clement Jones
To address the point about residents which the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, picked up, the Local Government Association and others have commented on that and it is the reason why these proposals have sometimes got rather stuck in the pipeline. I do not believe that this Bill will adversely affect local residents. The Bill explicitly safeguards residents from public nuisance caused by noise from live music, by allowing licence conditions to be imposed as part of the process under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. If these exceptions under the Bill are not granted we may well go backwards, as the coalition Government's Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill proposes changes to the Licensing Act 2003 that are aimed at dealing with alcohol-related crime.

Two proposals in particular may have the unintended consequence of stifling live music. The vicinity test for making representations is proposed to be removed, so that any party can now object to a live music event even if they are located in the licensing authority area. Also under the same proposals, "necessary" will be replaced with "appropriate" in the powers given to councils when imposing licensing conditions. In 2009, the DCMS Select Committee rightly expressed concerns about the automatic association between live music and public disorder, so if we are not careful we will very much be again in the area of unintended consequences of combining the two forms of licensing: alcohol and music. That will not produce an effect which will advance the cause of live music.