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The Licensing (Scotland) Bill: A Consultation on Liquor Licensing

Chapter 8
Training

The Nicholson and Daniels Reports

The Nicholson Report proposes the following range of measures:

• Appropriate training prescribed in regulations should be made available to Board members.
• There should be some provision to cater for situations following Council elections where not all members have received training prior to a sitting.
• In addition to the training requirement for personal licence holders, encouragement should be given to training for all who work in licensed premises.
• Training courses should be given official accreditation and specified in regulations.
• Casual staff do not need to be given formal training but should be given in-house basic instruction by the designated personal licence holder and should at all times be under the supervision of a trained person.

The Daniels Report proposes:

• Training courses should be mandatory for personal licence holders and on-site training provided for all other employees with personal licence holders undertaking refresher training every 5 years.

Consultation Summary

A majority of consultation respondents were in favour of Board member training being mandatory but agreed that there should be special provision to cover the period after a Council election. This could be done by delaying meetings or imposing a time limit. On staff training, again the majority felt it should be mandatory for all and not just personal licence holders. There should be a duty on personal licence holders to ensure the training is carried out. Most agreed that casual staff need not undertake training but that there should be a clear definition of 'casual' to avoid licensees using this as a loophole.

Our Approach

We believe that training for Board Members must be mandatory under the new system and are pleased to note that some Boards are already making training available on a voluntary basis. We intend to make special provision to cover the period following Council elections and believe this can be done by allowing Board members a period of 3 months to complete their training. Board members would not be allowed to sit until their training had been completed.

We acknowledge that personal licence holders should attend a mandatory training course appropriate for the type of licensed premises they will be working in. We also support the recommendation by the Daniels Committee that refresher training should be carried out every 5 years.

On staff training, we believe that this is an important mechanism by which we can maintain standards and indeed raise standards where this is required. We do not think it will be sufficient to merely encourage such training without any capacity to monitor whether adequate training or any training at all is being delivered. We believe it is appropriate for those permanent members of staff engaged in serving alcohol to be trained to an appropriate standard. This could be achieved as follows:

• permanent staff who are servers of alcohol must receive appropriate mandatory training at an agreed national level (which would be lower than that required for personal licence holders);
• this mandatory training should be delivered only by a qualified trainer;
• the options for such training would involve:
• staff attending an externally provided and nationally accredited training course;
• training provided in-house by a personal licence holder who has qualified as a trainer and where the training to be provided has been nationally accredited; and
• casual staff should be exempted from the need to receive mandatory training to a national standard but should be given basic on-site training by any personal licence holder. This would be subject to a clear definition of 'casual' and this might refer to a period of less than 2 to 3 months within those premises.

In addition, we would like views on whether the designated personal licence holder should be placed under a duty to ensure that the mandatory staff training is carried out. The provision of training should be monitored by the Liquor Licensing Standards Officers and we would need to consider further what evidence should be provided.

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