A SECOND off-licence in Barnsley town centre has agreed to stop selling high strength beer as part of a council crackdown on antisocial behaviour and littering.
Some off-licences are selling cans of imported lager with an alcohol strength as high as nine per cent for as little as £1 per can, fuelling antisocial behaviour problems and littering, particularly among street drinkers.
In a bid to tackle the problem, Barnsley Council launched a ‘Reduce the Strength’ scheme where officers work with licensed premises in the town centre to reduce the availability of high strength cans of beer, lager and cider.
As part of that it carries out ‘can marking’ operations to work out which off-licences are failing to work with officers, which involves tracing discarded cans of super-strength booze back to the retailers selling them.
An update on the scheme was given to councillors at a meeting of the statutory licensing board where licensing officer Debbie Bailey revealed a second retailer will no longer sell beer over 6.5 per cent strength in single cans or bottles.
She said: “We’re trying to identify where street drinkers are buying single cans of high strength lager, beer or cider, and officers have been out there picking cans up and looking at the batch numbers on the cans.”
She said during the most recent exercise 19 cans were recovered by officers from Sparrow Park, Peel Parade and the Pinfold Steps and six were traced back to three off-licences in the town centre which licensing officers believe are owned by the same person.
She said on that occasion the number of cans had been far fewer than officers had expected and this could be evidence the situation is improving. Previously, as many as 90 discarded cans have been picked up.
“There were not as many cans as we expected, nothing compared with what we got before and we think the initiative has had some impact and is improving.”
Debbie explained that on another litter pick 90 per cent of the cans were traced back to the same licensed premises and this had given officers the ‘ammo’ to identify a particular premises involved in flogging super-strength booze.
She said: “We’re going back to that address and signing them up to an action plan and that’s basically a condition of the premises licence and ask them to formally sign up to the scheme, playing a part in the overall effect of street drinkers and littering.”
Councillors were told officers are now working with South Yorkshire Police to ramp up the initiative by seizing cans from street drinkers to gain further evidence on where the booze is being bought.
Debbie said: “In conjunction with the litter picks we’re now getting police to seize the cans at the time they are drinking it. It will add more weight to what we are trying to do and trace to premises.”
She said more operations will be carried out in the coming months and officers will continue to work with licensees to prevent sales of high strength booze.
