Scotland - an 'entertaining' licensing change of note!

As we have previously reported, the Air Weapons and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2015 made some changes to the Scottish licensing regime. See our article: 'Scotland - Air Weapon and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2015 - Received Royal Assent'.

Those provisions or some of them are slowly being brought into effect under various ‘Commencement Orders’.

The fifth such Order brings certain provisions into effect on 1 November 2016 – but notably this includes section 75 of the Air Weapons etc. Act.

For entertainment licensing, not a matter for Boards but the local councils, where the relevant entertainment provisions have been adopted locally,  if you have a premises licence in Scotland, you still do not need to separately licence or consider licensing public entertainment under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982, Section 41.  This exemption also applied hitherto to premises licensed under a temporary occasional licence.

However under the above commencement order, the coming into effect of section 75 removes from occasional licences the exemption of the need for an entertainment licence - if this makes sense.

So wherever premises are or may be temporarily licensed by way of an occasional licence, going forward you will need to establish if any entertainment as defined is to be provided and separately cover that off with a separate entertainment licence, as may be required.  A minor, but possibly significant, change of which operators need to be aware.