The Home Office is consulting with interested parties on the implementation of Community and Ancillary Seller Notices (CAN) in England.  The process started on 11 November and closed on 9 December 2014.

New legislation passed earlier in the year is intended to introduce a lighter touch regime, allowing small accommodation providers and community groups to sell or give away, small amounts of alcohol without the need to apply for a full premises licence or for a temporary events notice but a cheaper and more easily obtained and retained Community and Ancillary Seller Notice instead.

This consultation is important because it is asking a few simple but fundamentally important question: like the number of beds that should be used to define a small accommodation provider, the number of units of alcohol per person that should be used to constitutes a small amount of alcohol, what constitutes a community group, how regularly community groups should be allowed to hold event where alcohol is provided and the predicted cost (estimated between £20 -£50) that authorities will need to charge for a CAN in order to recover their costs.

If you are in England you may or may not wish to responded as an organisation yourselves.  Regardless it is also probably worth checking what your own licensing authorities intends to say and, if your small accommodation providers and community groups are not aware, consider circulating the consultation to them or their local trade or representative bodies.

If you views on any of the 5 substantive questions posed then please let me have them ASAP for inclusion in a British Destinations’ response and/or so I can feed these into the Tourism Alliance response. Email us here.

The consultation document can be accessed at: Community and ancillary seller notices consultation 2014