Earlier this week Newcastle councillors agreed that the city’s late-night levy should be scrapped.
Currently, businesses in the city centre with a licence to sell alcohol late at night are charged a fee with the proceeds of these fees primarily going towards late-night policing, CCTV and marshals in taxi queues.
Partner Sarah Smith is Head of Licensing at Sintons. She explains the background of Newcastle’s Late-Night Levy. “The concept of a Late-Night Levy was introduced under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011. It allowed local authorities to impose a levy on premises licenced to sell alcohol during a specified late-night period, between midnight and 6am. Newcastle City Council adopted its levy in 2013, along with others. However, over the years other Councils have dropped theirs.”
Today Newcastle is one of only very few UK cities to operate a late-night levy and various voices in the hospitality industry have called for it to end in an attempt to ease some of the financial pressures facing the sector.
Sarah adds, “In Newcastle we also have a Business Improvement District (BID) operated by NE1 which raises funds from local operators to fund a lot of local initiatives. For some time, the licensed trade has argued that paying the late-night levy and paying toward the BID is too onerous”.
This week’s news will save money for hospitality businesses and has other implications, as Sarah notes: “The upside of not paying the late-night levy is that operators will save costs. However, I think the bigger gain for operators is that they will feel that their concerns about increasing costs and fairness have been listened to and taken on board by the Council. The downside is that the funding previously generated by the levy will need to be found from other sources but, considering the funding already provided and the responsible nature of the majority of licensed operations in the city, I don’t anticipate we will see a negative impact from its removal.”
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