Stuart Andrew MP, Kit Malthouse MP and Joanna Averley.

Q16 The Chair: Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to this meeting of the Liaison Committee. I am delighted to welcome our witnesses, Minister Malthouse virtually and two other witnesses. We are delighted to have you here. This is for the purpose of Lady McIntosh and her colleagues from the former Licensing Act 2003 Committee discussing with you, as a follow-up, their report. Before I hand over to Lady McIntosh and members, I invite you to introduce yourselves to the committee.

Kit Malthouse MP: Good afternoon. Thank you for having me. I am the Member of Parliament for North West Hampshire and Minister for Crime, Policing and Probation, but the Home Office lead on licensing.

Stuart Andrew MP: I am the newly appointed Housing and Planning Minister and Member of Parliament for Pudsey.

Joanna Averley: Good afternoon. I am the chief planner, so the senior civil servant for town planning in Government.

Q17 Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Can I start by welcoming our guests today? I extend a particular welcome to Kit Malthouse, who I understand is suffering, I hope not too badly, but we are particularly grateful to you for being with us this afternoon. Stuart Andrew, it is very good of you also, so early in your tenure, but I hope you find we are being very gentle. You are always welcome. I do not know if you were listening to the evidence we have heard, but I would like to start on the licensing system. We concluded quite strongly that there should be better co-ordination between the licensing and planning systems. We heard earlier this afternoon that perhaps we have not had as much progress and better co‑ordination that we might have expected.

I would like to ask each of you in turn what steps the Government are intending to take in both your departments to bring the licensing and planning systems better together. Might you consider taking legislative steps to do so in either of the forthcoming legislations of the planning Bill or the levelling-up Bill in that regard? We heard that perhaps the guidance is not really doing as much on co‑ordination as we would have hoped. Could I ask you, Minister Malthouse, to respond first?

Kit Malthouse MP: We are very keen for the two systems to work hand in hand. I wrote to all local authorities a couple of years ago pointing out that, under their current powers, they were able to co-ordinate very effectively between the two. My experience as a city councillor in Westminster, albeit some time ago, was that if you have a really good local planning and licensing function in your council, the two tend to work hand in hand very closely. In particular, local authorities where there is a particular density of licensed premises have to be on top of their game, so that combination tends to work.

Having said that, there is lots more that could be done on training and education, particularly of councillors, and I hope you have heard from the LGA about the work it is doing. We have certainly done a couple of workshops with it and the Institute of Licensing to get councillors up to speed, to really understand what they are able to do together in combination. As for the legislation coming, I will have to leave that to Stuart. He has control of the planning Bill.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Can I press you, Minister Andrew, particularly on the integration of the two?

Stuart Andrew MP: These are two very separate systems, almost asking two different questions, so it is important that we have those as separate entities. That said, we encourage, as Kit has just said, those two systems to talk to each other and to liaise with each other. Listening to some of the observations of the committee, we could look at offering support from the planning advisory service that supports lots of local planning authorities and giving a bit of training in that area, to ensure that the wishes of the committee are upheld.

We are still looking at all of the options that will be in the Bill, and we are considering everything at the moment, but announcements will be made in due course.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: The training, we have picked up, seemed to be going quite well. It is just that you have two different arms and two different sets of committees taking different decisions and working, as was said, in siloes. We could do better.

Joanna Averley: If I can come in with more observations on the two systems and the two regimes, it always strikes me that, in the planning system, when you give a permission for planning, the permission goes with the land, and it is about the built form and, ultimately, the buildings and their use. The licensing system goes with the individual or the entity, which is the licensee for the operation, and so they are two different sets of considerations.

Ideally, as is said in the NPPF in paragraph 42, they should be complementing each other and, obviously, dovetailed as much as possible. We have to be cognisant that a planning permission does not guarantee you a licence and neither does a licence guarantee you a planning permission; they are considering different things. Planning has to take in a very broad set of considerations, whether it is environmental outcomes, development regeneration outcomes or other aspects, so it looks at a very broad set of policy application at the local level for an individual permission. That will not always totally accord with what the considerations might be for a licence, so those two regimes need to be strong. They can complement each other, but they do not necessarily always lead to the same decision. We just need to be cognisant of that.

Kit Malthouse MP: I think I am right in saying that, on an occasion where the two decisions are brought together, there can be joint meetings. Certainly under the Act, I think the licensing committee can discharge other functions of the local authority, such as planning. Where the two do come together, a joint decision can be made, as far as I am aware.

Q18 Lord Foster of Bath: Just pursuing that complementarity issue, we proposed back in 2017 that, to protect existing businesses such as pubs and nightclubs, the agent of change principle should be included in both the planning guidance and the Section 182 guidance on licensing. It has been put into planning but not yet into licensing, and we will perhaps hear whether that is going to happen. In the evidence we have received today, we heard very clearly that, even with it in guidance, it was inadequate because it did not provide clear duties and responsibility for respective parties. There was a clear view from the witnesses we had that, actually, it should be placed into legislation so that everybody knew where they stood. I wonder, Kit Malthouse, whether you can tell us what your thoughts are on that and whether that is a possibility.

Kit Malthouse MP: I have been on both sides of this discussion, because I was Housing Minister when this first arose. Perhaps you remember the famous Ministry of Sound case in London that brought this to the fore, and we did undertake to make changes. From a licensing point of view, we were going to make changes to the guidance following the changes to the NPPF. Those changes, I gather, have been put through, and we are in the process of making the changes to the licensing guidance alongside it because we recognise that it is an important principle. As far as legislation and implementation go, that is one for Stuart.

Lord Foster of Bath: Can we just be clear? You are saying that it is the intention to put the agent of change into the Section 182 guidance.

Kit Malthouse MP: Yes, we will make the Section 182 guidance consistent with the NPPF.

Lord Foster of Bath: Thank you. That is very clear. What are your thoughts on the legislative question?

Stuart Andrew MP: We have already included this in the NPPF, but you are right. There is a whole raft of considerations we are making at the moment with regard to the changes to planning, so, obviously, we will look at this in a bit more detail.

Q19 Baroness Henig: Good afternoon, all. When we were doing our investigations, it was just at the time when Scotland was about to introduce its minimum unit pricing. The first part of my question is whether the Government consider the evidence from Scotland regarding the impact of minimum unit pricing sufficiently compelling to implement it in England, and whether the Government will commit to a timeframe to review the implementation of MUP. Secondly, what assessment have the Government made of the effectiveness of varying alcohol duty to reduce excessive alcohol consumption in comparison with looking at MUP? I do not know who will go first on this.

Kit Malthouse MP: I am happy to pitch in. Obviously, we are keeping an eye on what is going on in Scotland, although I have to confess to a personal resistance to the principle of manipulating behaviour by influencing the market in that way, albeit we do something not dissimilar with penal taxation on cigarettes. I feel resistant to the nanny state element of it, maybe because I am a bit of an old-fashioned conservative. Certainly, as evidence starts to emerge from Scotland, it looks pretty minimal. The studies I have seen seem to indicate no discernible impact on crime. It is a bit early to say whether the evidence is coming through on health as well, but we will keep an eye on it and see where it goes.

From our point of view, as you know, there are revisions going through the duty system, which the Chancellor announced last year, a big change that will effectively raise more money from those stronger drinks. Like for like, it is tax neutral, but you would imagine that, in theory, it should skew consumption one way or the other if you think people respond to those kinds of price signals. I guess the lesson from cigarettes is that taxation has to be incredibly penal before it has any kind of effect, and I am not sure that would be fair on the British public, the vast majority of whom drink responsibly.

Baroness Henig: If that helps to deal with the white cider problem, that would be very welcome because we did find that that was a big problem. On your first point, domestic abuse might be an interesting area to look at, certainly in Scotland. I think there may be some suggestion that domestic abuse has reduced as a result. I just throw that one out.

Kit Malthouse MP: As I say, it is early days. The role of alcohol in domestic abuse is hotly contested as an issue, and I know this from my 10-year campaign to bring in sobriety tags, particularly for domestic abuse offenders, which was resisted 10 years ago by groups that are involved in that area of policy but now, happily, is out there and seems to be working. I acknowledge the link; I certainly do. Whether making the stuff more expensive would help with that, I am not so sure.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: What you say about the differential in taxation is really illuminating because, if it has worked for white cider, it will obviously work for others. It is interesting to see that the Government may use that in place of MUP as a policy.

Kit Malthouse MP: I do not think that is the intention, but we will have to see whether that is the effect. Effectively, the duty increases the stronger the stuff, so we will see how it works out.

Q20 Lord Blair of Boughton: Minister, I think it would be fair to say that the most surprising response of government to our committee’s report was the decision not to do anything about licensing at airports, because there did not seem to be any particular reason why the risk of drunken people getting on aeroplanes should be allowed to continue in the way that it is, in the knowledge that the impact of drunken people on aeroplanes could be catastrophic. It seems to be a win-win position that you have refused.

Now, I have seen the answer that you sent out to that, which says that there does not seem to be a particular reason to do anything. The public inquiry that would follow a crash with a whole bunch of people going to a stag do would be very difficult to deal with, so I would be very interested to see what the key factors were that you considered when you decided not to accept this recommendation, which could, of course, also raise money for either local authorities or Government.

Kit Malthouse MP: There were a number of factors. Obviously, we did a consultation, and the majority came back against. I think only 28% were pro and over half, 55%, were against. It is a heavily regulated and controlled area. There is CCTV, fairly heavy security and quite a lot of supervision in that area already. There are significant industry initiatives in place, not least a code of practice on disruptive passengers. They now have sealed bags for duty-free alcohol and then they are running a series of education campaigns.

The penalties, already, for being drunk on a plane are very stiff and severe. As you will know, people can be denied boarding and can be removed. Although they are high profile in the media, the relative lack of disruptive incidents where alcohol is concerned, and the patchy evidence, made us feel that, perhaps, for the moment, it was not a step that we wanted to proceed with. In an era of social media, it is easy to snap a shot of somebody behaving badly in a plane and make it feel like every flight has one of those on, but the vast majority do not.

You are not talking about banning alcohol drinking airside, just limiting it, and that would not necessarily achieve a reduction in the number of people who cause disorder. It would just confine it to particular times of the day.

Lord Blair of Boughton: I still find it difficult to see that there is not a catastrophic possibility that could be avoided. All of us have been there at an airport and seen how passenger behaviour is. The licensing laws have considerable powers—revenue-raising ones. It just seems to me and to us a very strange decision, and we would only ask that you keep it under review.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Can I ask a supplementary to that? Clearly, there have not been many planes in the sky in the last two years because of the pandemic. We have already had a major incident in March of a plane being turned back, which was extraordinarily expensive for the airline, so could you give the committee a commitment that you will keep it under review?

Kit Malthouse MP: Yes, of course we will. If evidence emerges that we have a systemic problem with alcohol consumption flying, we will have to address it. At the moment, as I say, the evidence that it is systemic is just not there. Given the secure environment in which they operating, the industry initiatives and the lack of support from the industry, we did not feel that now was the time necessarily to move on that.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Thank you. That is very helpful. Could we now turn to the application system itself, Lord Taylor of Holbeach?

Q21 Lord Taylor of Holbeach: I would like to go back to where we started, and that is the complementary nature of licensing and planning. We have talked about joint meetings and all this, that and the other, but one of the missing ingredients is any opportunity to apply for licences on the GOV.UK website. This strikes me as being rather strange because it is something that can be fixed fairly quickly, in the sense that the criteria that the Government would consider satisfactory can be easily determined. Have the local authorities themselves been involved in trying to find a common theme for licence applications through an online application process? I think both Ministers, probably, would like to be involved in that.

Joanna Averley: Maybe Minister Malthouse wants to go first and we can add some things, but we are doing lots of work about the digitisation of the planning system, which is of interest there.

Kit Malthouse MP: On the basis that, fundamentally, the receiving organisation is the local authority, the form in which they receive it is essentially one for them, in the same way that I can apply for my parking permit online with some and, with others, I still have to fill in a form. That is more one for DLUHC than it is for me, I am afraid.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Thank you very much—lucky DLUHC.

Stuart Andrew MP: We just alluded the point that, in part of the planning changes that I hope are imminent, digitisation is a major factor, because we want to make it a much simpler process that is easier for residents to understand as well as those making applications. This is an area where there is a considerable amount of work going on at the moment in the department in preparation for that.

Joanna Averley: As you are alluding to, there are various processes that have become digitised in Government, so applying for your passport is the very obvious one. We are very conscious, particularly in the planning sphere, that a lot of output from planning authorities and interaction is still quite two dimensional. It is PDF-based and not necessarily very engaging for the user. Actually, in planning applications, there is quite a strong issue of errors, which then slows down the decision-making process. We have a significant programme that is already starting to look at digitisation of different aspects of the planning system.

As a good example of that, we have already been funding and co-developing two programmes with local authorities and innovators in this sector. One is called BOPS and one is called RIPA. One is the ability to put in a digital application. For example, Southwark has been trialling that. Another one is the back office function that enables the planning officers to make decisions with all the information at their fingertips, and it takes them through a very simple process, so it is about transparency of information, speed of application, speeding up of the determination of planning applications and doing all this work in a way that not just one but many local authorities can benefit from these innovations. There is significant progress in that area.

Lord Taylor of Holbeach: But nothing, as yet, has happened.

Joanna Averley: It is probably a conversation for us to have with Minister Malthouse as to what progress we might be aiming at in terms of licensing specifically. We can talk about the planning system.

Lord Taylor of Holbeach: I can see it is complicated in the sense that the whole definition of a local authority is that it is local, the whole definition of GOV.UK is that it is national, and the two do not necessarily think identically on all issues. Many of the criteria for licensing are nationally determined, and it would be helpful to applicants if they had an easy system that not only explained to them what they needed to be able to respond positively to but would enable Government to influence outcomes.

Kit Malthouse MP: I completely agree with that, but, as I say, quite a lot of it depends on the capability of the local authority concerned. I can remember going to the Municipal Journal local government awards back in 2003, at which Coventry council won an award for making a bold move in moving its internal processes from paper-based to using computers, whereas the rest of us had been using computers for over a decade. It depends on the authority itself and its capability, but it is definitely something that we should look at.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Can I just ask what the relationship is of your department, Minister Malthouse, with the GOV.UK platform? Are you the overarching department for this?

Kit Malthouse MP: No, the Cabinet Office looks after GOV.UK, so, when you are applying for your tax disk or looking at your revenue records and all the rest of it, I believe it is centrally controlled by the Cabinet Office.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Thank you. That is very helpful. Could we turn to disabled access, please? I am going to ask Baroness Scott of Needham Market to come in.

Q22 Baroness Scott of Needham Market: Good afternoon. You may remember that, in the committee’s original report, having heard evidence about issues with disability and access, it made a recommendation about licensed premises having to produce a statement and a plan to make them accessible. I think, at the time, government was not inclined to go along with that but undertook to have conversations with the industry and disability representative groups. Yet, last year, the disability survey found that 66% of respondents either could not access or had real difficulty accessing licensed premises, so it is feeling to many of us as though no progress is being made. I wonder whether you could outline what discussions have taken place and, more importantly, how we might speed this up.

Kit Malthouse MP: Our view is that the licensing system should not, I am afraid, be used to compel compliance with other bits of legislation. It is there for a specific purpose, and to use it in that way, we do not think, will be helpful. Having said that, there are conversations ongoing through the Cabinet Office disability unit, and its network of disability and access ambassadors, looking at particular industries. I know they are talking to Kate Nicholls, who is the hospitality industry lead. She is the chief exec of UKHospitality and has become a disability access ambassador to talk to the industry more generally about how it can comply with other legislation such as the Equality Act.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: You would agree it is inappropriate if people are excluded from a venue because there is not disabled access.

Kit Malthouse MP: Of course, but the question is the vehicle by which you get compliance, and that is not necessarily the Licensing Act. In many ways, the planning system should be dealing with that, particularly where there is a change of use.

Baroness Scott of Needham Market: I wonder whether you would accept that the discussions about where exactly the responsibility lies and which piece of legislation should be engaged is not getting people who do not have access very far. We made a big fuss during the pandemic about trying to get back to normal and people being able to get back out, and yet 66% of a large group of people are being excluded. Anyway, my rant is over, but I know Lord Blencathra wanted to say a word.

Q23 Lord Blencathra: My rant will just begin then. First of all, Kit, good luck shaking off the lurgy. I had it last week and I found regular doses of 18-year-old Highland Park worked wonders. Ministers, there are 335,000 shops, pubs, cafes, restaurants and retail outlets, and 71,000 are completely inaccessible to the 800,000 wheelchair users in the UK. In 2016, a House of Lords Select Committee investigated the impact of the Equality Act 2010 on disabled people and concluded that there were huge backward steps and that the Government were failing in their duty of care to disabled people.

The chair of the committee, Baroness Deech, said, “Disabled people are let down across the whole spectrum of life”. “The Government bears the ultimate responsibility for enabling disabled people to participate in society”. “It is simply not discharging that responsibility”. “It’s time to reverse the attitude that disabled people are an afterthought”. Minister, that grieves me as a supporter of Conservative Governments who were in the forefront of championing disabled rights. Now we are going backwards, and we need a bit of levelling up. Would you characterise the Government’s position on disabled rights as simply not giving a damn about disabled people, who are now an embarrassing afterthought? Would you convey that view to the equalities department if you disagree with me?

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Before you reply, I think Lord Blencathra would like to declare his interest with an APPG.

Lord Blencathra: Yes. I am an officer of the wines and spirits all-party group.

Kit Malthouse MP: No, I would not agree with that characterisation. The Government do enormous amounts of work to improve the lives of people living with disabilities. That ranges from the work the DWP does on its Disability Confident campaign, trying to get employers to offer opportunities to those who are disabled, right through to, in the planning system, enforcing the access requirements where available, so there is lots of work ongoing. I do not think that that would be a fair characterisation. I recognise the problem that you are raising.

The question, though, that is put to me is whether the licensing regime is the right way to get compliance. Given that it is asking very specific questions and has a very specific role, we are not necessarily sure that it is. That is not to say that we should not work harder to make sure that all the people who want to access those facilities that they currently cannot should be able to by some means. We need to make sure that disabled people have access to all premises, not just licensed premises, and the question is how we achieve that.

Lord Blencathra: I agree.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: On that point, Minister Malthouse, if the Licensing Act is not the right legislation to use, which legislation should disabled people who have been denied access rely on?

Lord Blencathra: It is the Equality Act 2010.

Kit Malthouse MP: As I heard somebody mention, the Equality Act 2010 points them to it, but there is quite a lot that could be done in planning and in building regulations. Now, that is not necessarily going to bring an overnight change because, obviously, change in the built environment is incremental. Nevertheless, it is a step in the right direction. I hesitate to speak for Stuart, but I know there have been big strides in planning and building regulation in that regard.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Minister Andrew, we have legislation coming, so this is your moment.

Stuart Andrew MP: Absolutely, but let me just reiterate what Kit says. I am passionate that we must make sure that any disabled person has the same sort of access rights as I enjoy. Kit is right that, where we have new builds or a change of use, the building regulations can help us achieve that goal. As he equally says, this is going to be an incremental approach. We continue to work with the Government Equalities Office, as well as the department, and, wherever possible, we will look at the changes that we are looking at with planning to see whether there are further steps that can be made to improve this for everybody.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Thank you very much indeed. Could we now turn to the night-time economy, Baroness Coussins?

Q24 Baroness Coussins: I think my question is for Minister Malthouse. I would like to ask whether you believe that the night-time economy has been given the right tools by government to create an environment in which both businesses can prosper, and consumers and communities can be safe. In your answer, Minister, I would appreciate it if you could include a comment specifically on the late-night levy because, although the Government disagreed with the original committee report that the levy should be abolished, you put a range of measures to improve it in the pipeline in the Police and Crime Act 2017. The pipeline is exactly where those improvements are still lurking. I wonder if you could tell us, please, when they will be implemented, why they have not been implemented already and whether we can expect to see them in action in the near future.

Kit Malthouse MP: You are right. We did undertake to try to improve the levy. It is a good and useful tool, and we have seen some very good applications of the funding it has raised, particularly looking at safety in the public realm. I am hesitant to use the Covid excuse when I have it myself, but what we said was that we recognise that, in some circumstances, the charge was disproportionate for certain premises and that we would consult them. We had to go through a consultation before we made any changes to look at what level of charge would be appropriate.

I am afraid Covid has delayed that consultation, not least because a lot of those businesses were hit particularly hard by the pandemic. We hope to undertake the consultation in the near future, and then we can do the changes to the levy following that. Given that that industry is recovering at the moment, we just have to wait and see who is left standing.

Baroness Coussins: How do you rate the effectiveness of the late-night levy in the meantime while we are waiting for these improvements as against a number of the other initiatives, whether they are industry-initiated or otherwise?

Kit Malthouse MP: We think it has been pretty good. We have seen some good use of it, in places such as Hastings, Nottinghamshire, Swansea and my old stamping ground of Westminster, that created safe spaces. Exeter put street marshals in the city centre and Barnsley has night-time marshals, so there are a number of initiatives that have come out of this work. That sits alongside the local alcohol action area programme that was launched back in 2014. It has been a useful tool, but it is not the only tool in the box. I have to say that having 20,000 more police officers will also help.

Stuart Andrew MP: We have the business improvement districts, where businesses are coming together to provide a welcome to the night-time economy. We have examples in Wolverhampton and Bradford where support is being given to groups that are the eyes and ears on the street to make sure that it is a safe place to be, along with the ability to contact services such as the local CCTV or get in touch with the police should the need arise. We have had over 300 of those around the country at the moment, so they have been very successful.

Kit Malthouse MP: Could I just add to that? While there is no silver bullet solution to this problem, I have, in the past, encouraged the police to make use of the quite extensive powers they have of control, particularly of closure of troublesome premises. There is often an element. when you are policing a licensing regime, that, if you are pretty strict and come down hard on miscreants, you get a lot of compliance. It is a little bit “pour encourager les autres”. I well remember the closure of a massive nightclub in Leicester Square called Home on the corner, just by what used to be the Swiss Centre. Persistently, there was disorder and drugs in there. It was a huge investment that somebody made to build it. When Westminster Council and the police moved to close it, by God did everybody else in the area start behaving.

Joanna Averley: The other addition that is relevant in terms of the Covid response is the work we have done on pavement licensing, which is interesting. We enabled an al fresco approach for people to still be able to meet and business to operate in external spaces. It might be worth the committee being aware that that flexibility came in in 2020 and runs until 2022, and the Government have the intention to make that a permanent feature. Importantly, the guidance about the application of pavement licensing extends to making sure that safety and other issues are considered in terms of the management of the space and activities that would be happening in the street.

Lord Taylor of Holbeach: One might add disabled people and their access to pavement space as something that has to be borne in mind.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: It was also interesting that the police evidence this afternoon was that this is the first summer since all lockdown restrictions have been lifted, so there is a concern. I love pavement cafes. It reminds you of continental Europe and warm atmosphere, but they are going to be monitored, are they?

Joanna Averley: Yes.

Stuart Andrew MP: Very much so, yes. Like you, I enjoy it; it is just unfortunately that we do not have the same weather. You are absolutely right that the other point is about access for people with disabilities and making sure that those are not impinged in any way. Equally, if there are concerns around security, there are measures in place there where we can revoke them if needed.

Kit Malthouse MP: I would just say that, certainly in city centres, your affection for pavement cafes is in inverse proportion to the proximity to your home, in my experience. We have to be slightly careful in our cities, where we have happily seen a regrowth of a residential population in the city centre, that we preserve their peaceful hours for at least part of the evening. I used to live opposite a pub, and you learn to live by the rhythm of the pub. That is for sure.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: We will not pursue that in too much depth. We would like to look at the record of refused, suspended and revoked personal licences, Lord Blair.

Q25 Lord Blair of Boughton: I think this is one for Minister Malthouse. Have the Government reviewed adding records of refused, suspended and revoked personal licences to the national register of taxi and private hire vehicles revocations and refusals? If not, why is this not moving forward? In the post-Everard era, where there is an emphasis on women’s safety in public spaces, this seems to me and to us to be quite an important recommendation.

Kit Malthouse MP: I am afraid that capacity constraints mean we have not looked at it yet, but we will. I agree with you that, given the dreadful events of the last year or so, it is definitely something that we need to push up the agenda. There are obviously vetting procedures for those who become private hire drivers, but a register is something that we need to look at quite urgently now.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Is that going to be addressed in the Private Member’s Bill that is coming through from Peter Gibson?

Kit Malthouse MP: I do not know—possibly.

Q26 Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: It is something that we will follow if that is the case.

Could I just ask about training? We heard some very positive things from the evidence sessions earlier on training of both licensing and planning officers, especially licensing officers, and, separately, from the police on the amount of investment and time they have put into training. Then we heard it had been paused because of Covid. Are you pleased with the way that the training levels are going, and are you convinced that they will pick up now that Covid is passing?

Kit Malthouse MP: We completely agree with you that you can never do too much training on planning and licensing. When I was doing Stuart’s job, I was always very keen that councillors be much braver about their planning decisions, and that could often be encouraged by better training about what their powers actually were and how they could push the envelope. The same is true of licensing. As I said earlier, we obviously talk to the Institute of Licensing and the LGA about how we can improve that training and spread it more widely. I hope you heard from the LGA earlier that that is taking place. That is not just of councils; that is police as well, so the National Police Chiefs’ Council is part of that conversation too. What we want to produce is a confident police force and a confident local authority that, together, manage a licensed premises in their area with rigour and discipline, in a way that brings compliance and safety. That can be done only by making them confident about their abilities through training.

Stuart Andrew MP: I would repeat the point that I made earlier about planning committees specifically. We will speak to the Planning Advisory Service about evaluating the training that is offered in this area.

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering: Can I thank you both, particularly in your adversity? We wish you every good health. You are a shining example to us all. Thank you very much for being with us.

The Chair: Thank you, Ministers of State and Joanna Averley, very much for this illuminating evidence session. We are all most grateful to you.