My Lords, I, too, back the words of our able chair on this Select Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I support what she has said and I note from the letter which we, as members of the committee, received only at 9 am today that the Leader of the House said:
“I am, however, pleased to hear that members of the committee are likely to be bringing their live insights into the policy to bear when the amendments are considered”—
so I would hate to let her down. I would therefore like to address in particular the issue of the late-night levy, which, as the Minister said, was introduced in 2011 and has had only seven local authorities take it up—seven, out of all the possibilities. There must be a reason for that. Of all of those, I shall examine Cheltenham, where the council withdrew the late-night levy. It did so because it raised less than 39% of the projected first-year income of £199,000.
2.30 pm
I fully support the arguments about not going into the detail, but this is important because of the significance of the 70:30 split: the police receive 70% of income raised without any level of accountability and the licensing authority gets 30%. Already, most licensing authorities have said that it is too expensive for them to go to the bother of raising this money when they receive only 30% of the income, and that it does not cover their costs. Yet nowhere in these amendments can I see anything that deals with the issue of the 70:30 split. There are many other arguments surrounding the late-night levy, but the 70:30 split is a central one to which I should like the Minister to respond. If the Government do not, I think that committee members will believe that there are flaws in the current approach.
I completely appreciate—again, as was in the letter that we received only at 9 am today—that some of these policies were laid out by the Government in previous publications such as the Modern Crime Prevention Strategy—but it still begs the question of why these specific amendments were tabled as recently as September. That was after this committee was set up.
I have an interest that I have to declare every time that I speak in this committee. As the holder of a temporary event notice every summer and winter for a school fair, I am a user of this system. I therefore know in some detail just how confused local authorities already are by the multitude of changes that have been made to this Act. We are very much in favour of one change, on live music, that was introduced by my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. However, I note that although this was introduced some time ago, the local authority with which I deal is still asking me out-of-date questions about my temporary event notice regarding this area.
One overwhelming factor on which this committee has heard from a lot of witnesses is that there are too many changes and that local authorities do not understand these changes sufficiently rapidly. Again, that begs the question: why change? Why introduce these amendments with assurances that you will change things back if the committee concludes that they do not work? Without pre-empting the decision of our committee, I am fairly sure that we shall conclude that they do not work on the 70:30 split that I talked about earlier.
This is my central question. I accept that the Government have published papers on this prior to the setting up of this ad hoc committee. However, they then took a decision to publish the amendments in September. Why, given that this committee is meeting? Secondly, why do they not deal with the 70:30 split? From what I can work out from the evidence that has come to us, that is the reason that most local authorities or licensing authorities see no need to take this up and see no bang for their buck if they do.