Wednesday January 8, 2003
The Guardian

It is the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell (Letters, January 6), who is
wrong. The licensing bill does not contain a balanced package of
deregulation but an unbalanced one designed to favour the late night alcohol and entertainment industry at the expense of local communities.

It will exacerbate rather than reduce the drunken mayhem that afflicts our town and city centres at night and inflict even greater problems of noise and other forms of nuisance on local residents, while reducing the power of local authorities to protect residents from these problems.

There is no good evidence that abolishing fixed closing times - which most other comparable countries retain - is the panacea that the government claims it to be. The conclusions of the Portman Group (in 1989 not 1999 as the secretary of state states) are hardly surprising, given that the Portman Group represents the very alcohol industry that will benefit from longer hours, nor for this same reason are they convincing to anyone except the gullible.

Had the government sought information from a less self-interested source it would have discovered that experience in this country and elsewhere suggests that greatly extending drinking hours usually creates more problems than it solves.

For example, a New Zealand researcher (not paid for by the alcohol
industry) concluded that increases in hours of sale are consistently related to increases in alcohol-related harm, including traffic injury, street disorder and violence, and that later and longer hours for alcohol sales contribute disproportionately to heavier drinking and drunken behaviour.

These are the reasons why local authorities, such as the one in which the secretary of state herself lives, as well as the Civic Trust and many residents' and amenity groups are campaigning for the bill to be amended.

Andrew McNeill
Institute of Alcohol Studies

Should we consider that the debate was settled by the actions of pub
landlord Robert Tyrell, who reportedly demolished his own pub because he was refused a late-night drink? This suggests we need NHS treatment homes much more than longer pub opening hours.
Joyce Glasser
London