Leeds Report undermines Late Night Levy

On the 18 December 2013 Leeds Executive Board will consider a report prepared and approved by the Council’s Scrutiny Board at their meeting on the 18 November 2013 which casts doubts upon the effectiveness of the Late Night Levy.

The Scrutiny report raises 2 main issues.  The first concerns the fairness of the blanket nature of the Late Night Levy; which will see a significant number of premises located outside of the City Centre or which are given as examples of low risk venues (such as the Malmaison Hotel) pay the levy.  The report states “We do not consider this to be proportionate and it fails to make economic sense.”

The report surmises that in order to reduce this unfair effect and target the city centre more precisely the commencement of the relevant supply period would need to rise from the proposed 12:30am to 2am, this would however reduce anticipated income from the Levy from circa £675k to circa £345k.  The authors of the report express the view that such a lesser sum “is not worth the resulting bureaucracy nor the unintended consequences in terms of additional costs to ‘non polluters,’ loss of goodwill from within the industry and the risk to some very successful existing voluntary and funded schemes.”

The second concern is how any money raised by a Levy would be spent:

“We were advised that the Licensing Committee agreed to support the levy on the grounds that a funding model would be developed between the council and police that would ensure that revenue raised would be for additional initiatives not for funding the police budget.

We remain to be convinced that the income generated will be used to the benefit of all payers. Members from all political groups stated this would be a very difficult message to deliver within their respective wards. Indeed there was an element of cynicism expressed within our meeting that the Council would effectively take the negative feedback whilst the police took the lion’s share of the income.”

The report concludes with the following recommendations:

1.  That the Executive Board does not pursue the introduction of a Late Night Levy.
2. That Officers within Licensing work with partners, including the licensing trade, to develop and enhance the various existing voluntary initiatives.
3. That the Executive Board reiterates its openness to support a BID which includes an element of initiatives to manage the night time economy.

 We will await to see the view of the Executive Board on the 18^th December.