Violent Crime Reduction Bill

Perhaps I may interrupt the noble Lord and try to deal with the illustration given by the noble Lord, Lord Borrie. What is envisaged in Clause 13 is an action plan, and the costs of that fall on the licensees. If the disorder does not happen where the licensed premises are located, how can the licensees respond to an action plan somewhere else? What are they supposed to do? You cannot expect the licensees to pay for policing the whole town. For some reason or another, I keep thinking of St James’s Street in Brighton when I talk about this issue. The people in St James’s Street, who may be perfectly respectable licensees, cannot be responsible for what happens in the railway station, the bus station or a taxi rank somewhere else in town. They cannot send their bouncers, or whatever they have in St James’s Street, to sort out these problems; nor, indeed, can they pay for private security firms to roam the whole of Brighton. That is the problem. I can understand an action plan which says, ““You will not serve someone who is drunk; you will remove them from the premises. You will make sure that your premises are properly monitored by security people who are qualified””, and matters of that sort. But I cannot see a private army, paid for by licensees, trying to police another area. That, to my mind, is the problem with the words ““or near””.