An article in today's Metro about 'Britain's 24-hour booze culture' includes this comment:
Simon Reed, vice chairman of the Police Federation, told MPs on the Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee that market towns have suffered most since the introduction of the Licensing Act. He said: "At times, policing is being really stretched, often in the smaller towns more than in the bigger cities. My impression of many market towns is they are really like the wild west on occasion because they are really stripped of resources."
I fixed all this a while ago, to summarise, scrap VAT on sales of alcohol (in fact scrap VAT, full stop) and replace modest (but bureaucratic) pub license fees with proper auctions of the value of licenses, the market value of which are £10,000s or even £100,000s a year (depending on location, size of premises and how long they are open etc). Provided the extra income covers the cost of the extra police officers, A&E visits, repairing vandalism etc, then we are still ahead of the game.
Wednesday 15 October 2008
"Market towns like wild west"
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10 comments:
Plus use Cossack cavalry in the market square.
TA, that is quite possibly true, but night time crime is more expensive/distressing than evening crime. And either way, it would be the least-bad way of raising the money to pay for the coppers, ambulancemen etc, because you can match costs with income.
Why do additional funds need to be raised!?! I already pay council tax every month so that town centres can be policed late at night.
PS They could always withdraw Educational Maintenance Allowances that give £30 of beer money to "deprived" youngsters every week!
PS Policing is being really stretched by early retirement and the large tax-free lump sums that accompany retirement!
S, at the moment pubs are paying £10,000s in VAT to central gummint every year, which gets muddled up with other taxes and filters back down to cover 90% of 'local'expenditure. Council Tax is more or less irrelevant. So it's the worst tax going to the wrong place.
Under my scheme, pubs don't pay VAT, they pay a proper licence fee to local council to cover associated costs (whether this is more or less than the VAT they used to pay is neither here nor there). If you insist on bringing council tax into this, why should council-tax-paying-non-pub-drinkers pay anything towards policing the pub crowds?
As to pensions, all this early-retirement-nonsense will go straight out of the window, that's all in the manifesto already.
If "Gadget" is to be believed, "policing is really stretched" because 95% of the force are, at any one time, either in the copshop filling in reams of paperwork, doing "Diversity Awareness Courses" or simply working 9 to 5, 5 days a week.
Put the police back on the beat, persuade magistrates that violently drunk yobs rounded up on an almost daily basis are not "in need of love and understanding" but actually need locking up - for *our* good, not theirs - and you may see something of a reduction in the problem.
P, agreed, but rounding them up and locking them away still costs money. I am suggesting the fairest and best way of raising that money.
Mark, your plan has the merit that the Council's expectant costs of a pub opening could form their reserve in the auction for the licence.
We need to have more fiscal accountability at a local level and using local licences (in lieu of central taxes) is a means to do that.
And while you're auctioning the pub licenses you could also auction smoking licences on a ration of, say 1:3 ie 30% of pubs would allow smoking.
That would raise a lot more and at the same time slow down the number of pub failures.
GS, great minds think alike, that was already at point 9.
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