Nobody is coming for your pint

The Guardian ran a story this week saying Westminster council wants to stop people standing up in pubs. Sadiq Khan called it anti-growth. Sacha Lord said it was like dragging us back to Covid times. And somewhere in me the old Local Gov beast stirred, because I’ve read enough draft licensing policies to know that councils don’t ban standing in pubs. They write consultation documents that make it sound like they might.

So I did what years of habit makes you do. I went looking for the council’s response.

The article itself was doing a lot of work with very little. The headline says “limit standing.” The policy text it quotes says applicants should be encouraged to provide more seating and discouraged from catering for “high volume vertical drinking.” Those are different things. By the time the piece reaches “banning standing in pubs,” the story has travelled a long way from a draft policy that’s out for consultation. The frame arrived before the facts, and once “fun police” is the frame, the facts are decoration. The Cumulative Impact Zone language, presented as a new crackdown, has been sitting in Westminster’s policy for over a decade. Councils are legally required to review licensing policy every five years. That’s the entire event. A routine review, a phrase that sounds sinister out of context, and a slow news week in August.

Westminster’s comms team put out three things in two days. A statement from the Deputy Leader on the day the story ran. A statement from the Leader the same day. A myth-busting Q&A the morning after.

The speed was right. In a story moving that fast, a rebuttal on day two is a rebuttal to a story everyone has already believed. They also escalated properly, portfolio holder first, Leader second, both named, neither hiding behind “a council spokesperson.” And they brought receipts: 98 per cent of licence applications approved, 4,000 licensed venues, a new pub in Covent Garden, a McDonald’s on Leicester Square just extended to 24 hours despite objections from the Mayor’s own police representatives. That last one is a proper counter-punch to the anti-growth line, and it didn’t make the Guardian piece.

The myth-buster is the best of the three. Plain English, question and answer, honest that the technical terms sound like jargon, and clear that fixing the wording is exactly what the consultation is for. “Is the council banning standing in pubs? No. This is 100 per cent untrue.” Short. Declarative. Lands.

Then it stumbles. The next question asks whether the policy document discourages vertical drinking, and the answer given is “No, it doesn’t.” Except it does. The draft uses the phrase “high volume vertical drinking” and recommends waiter service, in those words, on the page, where any journalist can screenshot them. The council’s reading is fair: in a saturated West End, a seated venue has an easier route to a licence than another standing-room bar. That’s an explanation worth giving. Flatly denying words that are checkably there is not an explanation. It’s a second story waiting to be written.

There are smaller wobbles too. One statement says over 98 per cent approved, another says less than 1.5 per cent rejected, and those numbers don’t quite meet in the middle. The Leader’s statement spends a paragraph on City Hall’s agenda and people making political points, which is satisfying to write and does nothing for the person who just wants to know whether they can still stand at the bar of the French House. And a rebuttal whose whole argument is “they misread our document” should not contain the phrase “the Mayor’s London-wider planning.”

The underneath of all this is that the story only existed because a consultation document used ten-year-old licensing jargon and nobody translated it before it went out the door. The myth-buster proves the council can write about this policy in plain English. It just did it 24 hours after the national press did the translating for them, less charitably. Publish that Q&A alongside the draft policy and there is no story. “We’ve said it” is not the same as “they’ve heard it,” and a consultation portal full of jargon hasn’t really said it at all. Public sector comms teams already know how quickly the ground can move under a message they thought was safe; this is what it looks like when the ground is your own document.

But a word for the comms team… A national paper, the Mayor of London and the night-time economy lobby all landed on a routine five-yearly review, and within 48 hours you had two named politicians on the record and a genuinely decent myth-buster out the door. The consultation is doing what consultations are for, surfacing the confusing wording so it can be fixed. Loudly, sure. But that’s the process working.

The fun police headlines will pass. The pint was never in danger.

Turns out plain English is a licensing condition too.