Issue - meetings

PREMISES: The Chequered Flag, 32 Borough Street, Castle Donington, Derby, DE74 2LA

APPLICANT: Licensing Authority, North West Leicestershire District Council

To determine an application for a review of a premises licence in respect of the above. Representations have been received from various parties. A notice of hearing inviting them to attend has been sent to each of them. If they fail to attend, the hearing can be held in their absence or adjourned.

The following documents are attached:-

a)     Report of the Licensing Enforcement Officer.  At the beginning of the Hearing, the authority shall explain to the parties the procedure it is proposed to follow.

The Hearing shall take the form of a discussion led by the authority and cross-examination shall not be permitted unless it is required to consider the representations.

The Chairman introduced the parties in attendance and outlined the procedure to be followed. It was agreed that the maximum presentation time would be fifteen minutes.

The Licencing Authority presented her report. She set out the conditions of licence, the history of alleged breaches, and the regulatory responses these breaches had elicited. She then set out the multi-authority framework which had reviewed the licence and the representations received. She was happy that the premise licence review process had been followed. She concluded by advising the sub-committee on the authorities statement of licencing objectives, the sanctions available to the panel if necessary, and the recourse available to the Licence Holder if he was unhappy with the decision.

The Licensing Enforcement Officer, speaking as the Applicant, presented his report. He noted that the issue of CCTV was central to the review brought before the Sub-Committee, and advised Members on the conditions of licencing pertaining to the CCTV and the violations of these conditions. He noted that four of the complaints discussed in the report had been from the same complainant and the fifth had been anonymous. He detailed the precise nature of the complaints, as set out in the report, and the communications he had had with the Licence Holder over them. He then discussed the PACE interview he had had with the Licence Holder, and the peculiarly large amount of ‘no sales’ on the till receipt that day. He did accept that the till receipt on the day in question matched the sales. He suggested the Licence Holder was the only Licence Holder in the District who was so intransigent on the question of CCTV: even other venues with good reason not to provide CCTV nevertheless did so. He stressed, in closing, that this was a uniquely grave case.

In response to a question from a Member about why there would be so many no sale receipts, the Applicant’s theory was that these would be evidence of sales being done discreetly in violation of licence conditions.

One of the representatives from Leicestershire County Council Highways Department asked if there were any cases of street furniture outside the premises since October 2022 and the Applicant said that yes, there was.

The Licence Holder spoke next. He told the panel that he had opened the venue in 2015. The seats issue had escalated since. The waste issue was something he was compliant with. He felt the complaints about the violation of licence times were exaggerated, considerably, and that he had done everything he could to keep to his licence conditions. The key complainant, he added, had a highly personal and largely vexatious agenda.  With regards to the issue of seating, the lack of outside seating had caused severe financial pressures and during the Covid-19 pandemic outside seating had been encouraged by national Government guidelines; the ruling of Leicestershire County Council on this matter was unjust. Furthermore, seating outside the venue also served to police people’s behaviour.  He also felt Members should know that  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4