The legislative bandwagon for the licensed trade rolls on. Now fronted

At long last the Department for Culture, Media & Sport has got round to correcting some of the technical flaws in the Licensing Act.

Recent attention in licensing circles has switched to Scotland, where a new Licensing Act received the Royal Assent in December 2005 and is due to be brought into effect gradually from next February until 2009 - giving plenty of time, so it is said, to avoid the problems that the quick transition brought to the English process.

When the new Licensing Bill was going through Parliament, I commented in OLN that the government wanted to remove the distinction between different types of licences and provide a "one-size-fits-all" permission.

There has already been some confusion over the effects of the new police powers of closure in the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2005. Muc