Scottish licensing laws
Well, I've been blogging more and more recently, so I reckon it's time for a bit of a rant. With the recent overhaul of the Scottish licencing laws, a number of changes have been introduced in how alcohol can be sold in Scotland.
Sundays no longer get special treatment with the old no alcohol before 12:30 on a Sunday scrapped and a standard no alcohol before 10am every day. This is a step forward in my eyes, no longer do I have a law forced upon me which was created solely to appease specific religious beliefs. But this is not the focus of my post.
Another change made is the scrapping of happy hours, pubs can no longer change the price of alcohol sold for any period less than 72 hours. I'm pretty ambivalent on this one, but certain newspapers are today reporting on a "Loophole" in the law which means that some pubs are now doing "happy days" where they will do drinks promotions for a period of 72 hours up to 5 days or so and then bump the prices back up at the weekend. One would premuse this is to try and get some more footfall during the week.
This doesn't really seem like a loophole to me, the law says 72 hours, so I don't see how adhering to the law and reducing the price for 72 hours or more is being cheeky or flaunting it in any way. Just more sensational journalism on the subject. Aside from this, neither of these papers even contemplate the fact that maybe the law is designed this way so that we don't encourage people to go out and drink as much as they can in a 1 hour period when things are cheap. The only way I can see pubs could flaunt this rule and break this idea would be if their 72 hour period was set up to end at say 6pm on a Friday, there by encouraging "binge" drinking between 5pm and 6pm straight after work. Although, no pubs seem to be doing this.
I've not read the law in depth, but I think the following is more of a loophole than serving cheap drink during the week. If I was an unscrupulous publican what I would do is buy in e.g. a keg of some cheap lager and sell it at £2 a pint for an hour a day, but don't sell it any other time. I've not changed the price of the drink, it's just only available at certain times and outside of that time you'll have to buy the more expensive stuff.
I don't see how the legislation could protect against this, you could even go one step further and only hold a certain amount of the cheap drink in stock and when it's sold out that's happy hour finished until you get more in stock the next day. After all, the government can hardly demand that if you sell one drink for a price and it runs out that a different, but similar, drink has to be sold at the same price as well, otherwise all pubs would have to sell all their lagers at the same price.
Anyway, that's just my thoughts on the subject.
Sundays no longer get special treatment with the old no alcohol before 12:30 on a Sunday scrapped and a standard no alcohol before 10am every day. This is a step forward in my eyes, no longer do I have a law forced upon me which was created solely to appease specific religious beliefs. But this is not the focus of my post.
Another change made is the scrapping of happy hours, pubs can no longer change the price of alcohol sold for any period less than 72 hours. I'm pretty ambivalent on this one, but certain newspapers are today reporting on a "Loophole" in the law which means that some pubs are now doing "happy days" where they will do drinks promotions for a period of 72 hours up to 5 days or so and then bump the prices back up at the weekend. One would premuse this is to try and get some more footfall during the week.
This doesn't really seem like a loophole to me, the law says 72 hours, so I don't see how adhering to the law and reducing the price for 72 hours or more is being cheeky or flaunting it in any way. Just more sensational journalism on the subject. Aside from this, neither of these papers even contemplate the fact that maybe the law is designed this way so that we don't encourage people to go out and drink as much as they can in a 1 hour period when things are cheap. The only way I can see pubs could flaunt this rule and break this idea would be if their 72 hour period was set up to end at say 6pm on a Friday, there by encouraging "binge" drinking between 5pm and 6pm straight after work. Although, no pubs seem to be doing this.
I've not read the law in depth, but I think the following is more of a loophole than serving cheap drink during the week. If I was an unscrupulous publican what I would do is buy in e.g. a keg of some cheap lager and sell it at £2 a pint for an hour a day, but don't sell it any other time. I've not changed the price of the drink, it's just only available at certain times and outside of that time you'll have to buy the more expensive stuff.
I don't see how the legislation could protect against this, you could even go one step further and only hold a certain amount of the cheap drink in stock and when it's sold out that's happy hour finished until you get more in stock the next day. After all, the government can hardly demand that if you sell one drink for a price and it runs out that a different, but similar, drink has to be sold at the same price as well, otherwise all pubs would have to sell all their lagers at the same price.
Anyway, that's just my thoughts on the subject.
posted by Unknown at 10:41 PM
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