I was interested to hear about the campaign on Facebook to have the Inverclyde curfew for admission to licensed premises lifted and the decision of the Licensing Board to hold a public consultation on this matter.
As I am not on the Licensing Board I won't have any say on what the Board decides. While the Board is composed of Councillors it is independent of the Council. Members act as individuals and are not subject to a political whip.
This debate has of course been going on for a long number of years - I remember moaning about the curfew when I had a social life - and I don't envy the members of the Board. While it is important that they listen to the views of those who socialise in local pubs and clubs they also have to be mindful of the concerns of residents who live in our town and village centres.
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I have written about this on several boards in the past, and indeed have responded to the Facebook thing on the subject.
ReplyDeleteMy basic position is that the curfew is good for Inverclyde, and I'll tell you why.
Firstly, I worked in the entertainments / licenced trade for a long time, in many venues, both here and across this country and abroad.
The thing about the curfew is that it means your customers are in and captive by 11:30pm and they will stay until you close, or until they are bored.
When the curfew moved to 11:30 from 11pm a few years ago, many licencees took a hit because the crowd
were 30 minutes later in turning up for the last minute rush. And by that time, they had already spent the larger part of their disposable income elsewhere. Net result - smaller take.
Longer term, that means that some businesses will fail.
Now, if you take Largs as an example, there is no curfew. What that means is that there is no one place where you can go for a garuanteeed stonking night out. What you have is a dozen or so places with a mediocre night out going on as people flit from one to another as soon as they hear a record they don't like. Trust me on this. And the result of this is that venues close and change hands more often.
Right now, Inverclyde has a very low disposable income. A couple of years ago there was an argument for the removal of the curfew to allow shift workers in after their conti shift finished. But that is gone now. There is no industry, no IBM, very little National and no Compaq any more, so the 10,000 shift workers are doing other stuff, have grown up, or have moved away.
On top of that, there are much fewere venues fighting for a smaller and smaller spend. And if they are subjected to a migrant crowd after 11:30, they will homogenise into each playing to the lowest common denominator, so that each of them will be playing the same Brown Eyed Girl and Stuck In The Middle in an attempt not to alienate the masses. That's why all radio stations sound the same these days - there are too many and they are unregulated, chaing the same diminishing crowd.
And that is when the public will lose out, because they will have lost choice.
I suspect the real reason behind this campaign is because in most places you can't nip out for a fag after 11:30 and get back in. Otherwise no-one would have bothered.
I strongly predict that if the curfew is removed, you will find places still half empty at midnight, where before they would be heaving.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and that's why I can look back at the benefits of the curfew and only hope to convince the current clubgoing generation that it's a positive thing - despite the fact it's not for the reasons it was intended.
Anyway. Since when did Facebook run Inverclyde Council ?