Would you serve alcohol to this teenager?

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Title – Would you serve alcohol to this teenager?Source – The Kent & Sussex Courier
Date – 21st August 2009

Underage drinking is creeping back up the agenda and this type of headline is not what the

Licensed Retail Sector needs right now. There are two sides to this type of journalism; it has a purpose but it is also fraught with the risk of sensationalising the problem.

There is clearly some kind of problem with the levels of training and enforcement in those outlets identified. What surprises me most in the number of outlets claiming to run a ‘Challenge 25’ policy and still failing to recognise this 17 year old.

The very fact that they are proactive enough to run ‘Challenge 25’ rather than the more common ‘Challenge 21’ suggests that they take underage sales seriously; equally it makes the mistakes more pronounced as they have this stronger policy in place.

There does need to be more emphasis on training and the standard of training also need to be examined. Training which just ‘ticks the box’ achieves very little and far too much training in the sector seems designed to ‘tick the box’ or to simply prepare people to pass an exam; rather than looking at ways to educate the sector.

Our courses are designed to prepare people for their examinations by educating them in the subject. Our very high pass rates reflect the understanding we give candidates attending our courses, rather than simply pointing them towards certain facts and statistics which may guide them in the exam questions, but which because they are not being presented in context are soon forgotten.

The personal licence course (NCPLH) in particular (which is now considered the standard training for those working in the Licensed Retail Sector) does not actually require any mandatory training at all; candidates can attend the examination without any preparation, training or self study and if they pass, can obtain a personal licence to sell and authorise the sale of alcohol.

These personal licence holders can then authorise others to sell alcohol without giving them any training at all. Only if something goes badly wrong is there any comeback on this approach.

It is the minority who take this lack lustre and irresponsible approach; but the fact is someone selling alcohol under the authorisation of a personal licence holder is currently not legally obliged to have any training.

To defend the sector and the many Responsible Alcohol Retailers, trading in this environment is very difficult. Journalist sending 17 year olds into shops to try and purchase alcohol (unless they were actively supported by weights & measures officers or the police) is not only counterproductive when articles offer an unbalanced approach, but also breaks the law; it is a criminal offence for anyone under the age of 18 to purchase or ATTEMPT to purchase alcohol. So even if no money changed hands this young man was put in a position where he may well have been breaking the law and subject to a maximum fine of £1000. There is also an offence of sending someone to purchase alcohol who is under the age of 18, which carries a maximum fine of £5000. Arguably if there was no involvement from authorised weights and measures officers or the police the paper itself could be committing this offence by sending this young man in to attempt to purchase alcohol.

But I suspect this is not something which would be in the public interest to pursue.

The fact is we need to encourage better training and enforcement, not to make the life of retailers difficult or more expensive, but to show-off the many good retailers in the sector and weed out the irresponsible ones.

Let us not forget though that the problems of underage drinking are much more profound than the retailers responsibility; society itself bares the most responsibility. It is well documented that much of the alcohol young people drink comes from their parents or older friends. Our society itself is also not innocent in the reasons behind young people choosing to drink alcohol. Maybe next time the journalists should first discover where the alcohol comes from rather than presenting their article as if 100% comes from ‘rogue’ retailers.

In the mean time, retailers need to be proactive and continue to improve their systems. Attending our NCPLH course they would have been given a written Underage Sales Policy which they can take away and adopt directly in their workplace, without the need to do anything more than incorporate it into employee training. We know time is tight and we provide many solutions tailor made for our clients.

At Beyond The Blue we run a number of courses for those working in the Licensed Retail Sector to help them sell alcohol more responsibly. These include; The Award in Responsible Alcohol Retailing (ARAR) designed for front-line staff to help them meet their statutory requirements; The National Certificate for Personal Licence Holders (NCPLH) which qualifies candidates to apply for their personal licence; Our Conflict Management and Resolution (CMR) course compliments these courses to help employees deal with Workplace Violence and alcohol related disorder.

Please visit our website at www.btbl.co.uk. For a complete list of Blog entries visit our National Press Archive page.

For more information on any of our services, please call us on 0845 602 55 95 or Contact Us.