Agenda and minutes

Councillor Gawthrope was appointed as Chair for the meeting. 

No declarations of interest were made.

All parties noted the procedure.

The Licensing Enforcement Officer presented the report and outlined the application.

In response to Member’s questions the Senior Technical Officer confirmed that no complaints had been made to the Licensing Authority regarding the Tesco store on Hills Road.

Applicant

Mr Bark made the following points:

i.             He would talk about what Tesco was about, go through the policies Tesco had in place and then summarise his points.

ii.            He referred to the Cumulative Impact Policy and the test which was contained within paragraph 5.10. He explained that this was in fact a two stage test.

iii.           Each application should be judged on its own merits.

iv.          The existing premises licence was one of the old converted Magistrates issued licences.

v.           The store’s opening hours were 6am until 11pm, the application sought to align the ability to sell alcohol with the store’s opening hours.

vi.          Tesco Express was a convenience store, alcohol sales equated to 7-9% across the country.

vii.         95% of sales of alcohol were linked to other goods.

viii.       The customers for this store were people who worked or lived in the area.

ix.          During 6-7am less than 0.1% of customers purchased alcohol during this time period. The application was about flexibility.

x.           To a certain extent the Police were the guardians of the Cumulative Impact Policy (as they had requested the policy). There were no objections from the Police to the variation application.

xi.          Tesco wanted to be at the forefront of best practice:

a)   they had a good neighbour policy

b)   there had been no incidents logged by the Council since the premises opened in 2005.

c)   They had a think 25 policy, they were the first company to introduce the policy back in 1999 (at that time it was a think 21 policy).

xii.         If an age restricted product was scanned at the till, it required a member of staff to override this either by confirming that ID was shown or that the person was clearly over 25. The till would also display the date of birth for a person would be 18 on that date, so that it was easy for staff to carry out an ID check.  

xiii.       Tesco undertook their own mystery shopping checks, using 18/19 year olds. They cannot use children younger than 18 as only Trading Standards and the Police have powers to do so. These checks were undertaken monthly.

xiv.       Safe and Legal checks were carried our quarterly, this included checking premises were complying with their conditions and this would be signed off by Store Mangers.

xv.        Tesco had more people in senior / middle management roles from people who started working on the shop floor than other companies. 

xvi.       All staff members received training on age restricted products this was refreshed yearly and at busy periods during the year.

xvii.     All Managers had conflict training so they had the right tools to deal with situations involving conflict.

xviii.    Tesco operated a ‘you say no, we say no’ policy to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 18/4/Lic