Friday offered a second sitting. Barely half an hour after the Belonging launch wound down, the West Wing of Guildhall was filling with representatives of the City’s hospitality liveries — and, for good measure, all four of its Ale-Conners.
The gathering was convened by Deputy John Fletcher, Chair of the City’s Licensing Committee, with a straightforward ambition: a standing dialogue between the Corporation’s licensing arm and the livery companies closest to the hospitality trade, so that the regulatory and the commercial ends of a good night out pull in the same direction. It is exactly the sort of table this office exists to sit at, and I am pleased to report the Ale-Conners turned out at full strength.
Top of the agenda was the Corporation’s new draft Licensing Policy, whose public consultation had opened at six o’clock that very morning. The licensing team walked us through it: a policy that means to be pro-business and pro-growth while keeping real protection for residents; that prefers evidence and street-by-street judgement to blanket standardised hours; that strengthens the ground on public safety, from tackling violence against women and girls and drink spiking to accessibility and assistance dogs; and that — for the first time — formally recognises the livery companies as part of the City’s civic and business ecosystem. With more than two hundred alfresco licences now live across the Square Mile, the streetscape this policy governs is changing fast, and the team were clear that they want views from every quarter: operators, residents, liveries and City workers alike. If that includes you, the consultation is open — the office will be doing its bit to push it through every livery network it can reach.
We were also given a proper look at Safety Thirst, the Corporation’s long-running accreditation scheme for licensed premises: annual multi-agency inspections, a code of best practice, an awards night, and a meaningful discount on the late-night levy for accredited venues trading after midnight. The Square Mile holds roughly 980 licences and only eighty or ninety premises currently carry the accreditation, so there is headroom — if you run a venue, it deserves a look, and there was even talk of livery halls joining the scheme.
Then came the maps, at which point regular readers will sense where this is heading. The Corporation’s data team demonstrated their interactive licensing map, which layers every licence in the City — hours, tables and chairs, safe havens and more — over a nightly feed from the licensing register. It is a serious piece of work: a single source of truth, which is exactly what good decisions get built on. I may have mentioned that I keep a pub map of my own, along with the walking trails that turn a list of historic pubs into a printable tour; a working session with the data team has duly been agreed, to see what the two exercises can lend each other and how both can feed the ambitions of Destination City.
I floated one more idea while I had the floor: that when an Ale-Conner conducts a ceremonial tasting, the venue should have something to show for it — a small sticker in the window with a QR code. Nothing regulatory, simply a mark that the ale was conned and found good, linking through to the pub’s history and the City’s safety initiatives, from Safety Thirst to Ask Angela. Seven centuries of civic tradition, measurable in clicks. The room seemed to like it, or at the very least nobody objected loudly.
My thanks to Deputy Fletcher for convening the morning and chairing it briskly. The four of us now owe the room a short paper on how this office can best support the Corporation and the hospitality industry — which, after two Guildhall meetings in the space of a week, is beginning to write itself. More as it develops.
Field research for a consultation response can, of course, be conducted at any of the 180-odd establishments on the pub map. Purely in the interests of evidence-based policy.