Gary Grant, barrister and licensing advocate at Francis Taylor Building said something at the IoL’s national training event last November that made my ears prick up.
He said the purpose of council licensing was to put in place risk-based controls but not to ‘regulate activities out of existence’. He was talking about alcohol licensing. But his words resonated with me because some councils appear to have a desire to ‘regulate chuggers out of existence’.
The current high profile example is Birmingham City Council, which is doggedly pursuing a byelaw it intends to use to prevent street fundraising.
We at the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA) think the byelaw has little chance of being approved by communities secretary, Eric Pickles.
A proposed byelaw could restrict street fundraising. It is contrary to government policy – in his response to the enquiries conducted into the Charities Act 2006, the minister for civil society, Nick Hurd, endorsed PFRA’s method of co-regulation. It doesn’t meet the requirements of the new Regulators’ Code launched recently by the Better Regulation Delivery Office.
But rather than critique the practicalities of the proposed byelaw, perhaps what is more relevant is to examine the decision-making progress that led the council of the UK’s second city to spend thousands of pounds of council taxpayers’ money on a Byzantine sledgehammer to crack a small licensing nut when the PFRA can supply a free pair of regulatory nutcrackers.
The decision to press ahead with a byelaw split Birmingham council’s licensing committee and was decided only with the chair’s casting vote. One of the reasons for ruling out working with the PFRA was on the grounds of ‘privatisation’. Cllr Gareth Moore, who sits on the committee, criticised this decision in a guest blog on the PFRA website.
Cllr Moore said: ‘It is not good practice that solutions are ruled out on the grounds of political ideology…in a regulatory capacity it should be fixing the problem, not how you fix it, that takes priority…we as councillors must continue to focus on resolving the problems we face and not get bogged down in how we fix them, as until we do, ultimately nothing will get resolved.’
Cllr Moore introduces an interesting point when he talks about ‘ideology’. While he was referring to an ideological stance against ‘privatisation’, we have noticed what could be described as a ‘licensing ideology’.
When we work with town centre managers, we often find they want a practical solution to controlling street fundraising in their towns and are eager to work with us when they find out what we can do. They tend not to be bothered who sorts it out as long as someone does. But others appear to think that it’s not just important that the issue is resolved; it’s equally important who does the resolving.
But, that approach leads to incoherent and expensive byelaws that end up being ineffectual while the issue it aimed to address remains, whereas partnership working delivers the outcomes that suit everyone.
As Cllr Moore says, councils are doing no-one any favours if they allow problems to persist out of an ideological belief that if they can’t fix it themselves, then no-one else should.
Dr Toby Ganley is head of policy at the PFRA.
