Council bosses say they’re unsure how many checks on bars, pubs and clubs have been carried out on licensed premises. Bristol City Council is responsible for enforcing rules included in premises licences, to make sure venues are keeping punters safe and preventing crime.
Licensing inspectors weren’t recording every enforcement visit, or the outcome of their visit, so it’s unclear how many checks are taking place and how many issues are being spotted. That’s partly due to staff using “end-of-life” software two decades old which is no longer being updated.
Several problems within the licensing team were highlighted by a recent internal audit. Councillors on the audit committee quizzed council bosses about these problems during a public meeting on October 1.
Kurt James, neighbourhood enforcement team manager, said: “We’ve been using that piece of software for 20 years. It’s been up for renewal for a while now, but that procurement exercise has been delayed. As of today, IT has extended the life of the Civica app by another year, allowing us to procure a piece of software that’s better for recording information.”
He added that the council’s IT team has offered support to allow the team to record data better. The number of visits has also increased, from 56 between April last year and March this year, to 69 visits since this April.
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Another problem was that debts were left unchased due to a lack of council staff. Venues have to pay the council every year to renew their premises licence, but some were not paying these fees, and council staff did not chase up these debts.
Jon Martin, regulatory services manager, said: “The underpinning problem with licensing has been the very high turnover of staff, principally caused by low grades resulting in really high churn numbers of officers. We also had a recruitment freeze, which resulted in us having to pull in temporary staff.
“To put into perspective in the last three years, we’ve had something like 33 temporary staff within a staff base of 12. All of those staff required training. That creates a wholly inefficient service.
“Because there’s such a high turnover of staff, we weren’t able to require debts. Now that we’ve got a stable base in place for our staff, we’ve now implemented training for debt management. We’re in a much better place than we were when the audit was undertaken.”