Violence rates unaffected by 24-hour licensing laws

Study finds no correlation between violent crime and flexible alcohol licensing following the 2003 Licensing Act, with researchers describing the policy intervention as "built on weak evidence". The enthusiasm to act needs to be balanced with careful and systematic attempts to understand the implications and effectiveness of these interventions - David Humphreys A new study on violent crime and flexible alcohol licensing in Manchester - focusing on the two years before and two years after the introduction of the Licensing Act in late 2005 - has found no evidence that changes to licensing legislation had any effect on levels of violence. The study was carried out at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Criminology, and is published today in the journal Social Science and Medicine. The 2003 Licensing Act - introduced in November 2005 - allowed pubs, clubs and off-licences to apply for later licensing hours beyond the traditional 11pm cut-off in an effort to curb levels of alcohol-related street violence, in the belief that, by staggering the point at which people were forced to stop drinking, revellers would not empty into the streets at the same time of night, so confrontations would be less likely. Many opposed the Act, with media headlines and some MPs warning that it would have the opposite effect - serving to increase alcohol-related violence as it would allow more people to continue drinking beyond the point of controlling their aggression. The study used data from Greater Manchester Police and the Local Authority to compare recorded rates of violence rates with licensed trading hours in wards across the city from February 2004 to December 2007 - roughly two years either side of legislative change.