Meeting of the Parliament 23 April 2015
It is my pleasure to speak on behalf of the Local Government and Regeneration Committee. The Air Weapons and Licensing (Scotland) Bill is an important and necessary piece of proposed legislation.
Before I embark on discussing the core of our deliberations, I will take a moment to set out the key role that licensing plays in Scotland. Licensing assists in preserving public order and safety, reducing crime and advancing public health. I will return to those objectives later, as they were the backdrop to our scrutiny and are fundamental to the recommendations that we made in our report.
Although we recognise the importance of those objectives, few of us consider the relevance of licensing to our daily lives. For those we spoke to, licensing is about their livelihoods, the services that they use and the activities in which they take part. The bill is wide ranging and deals with the complexities of licensing various activities, such as owning or using an air weapon, selling and purchasing alcohol, operating taxis or private hire cars, dealing in scrap metal, holding public entertainment events and running sexual entertainment venues.
Some obvious headline stories emerged from the bill—for example, the creation of two new licensing regimes: one for air weapons and the other for sexual entertainment venues. Both those aims are praiseworthy, but they are not the only stories that we uncovered. I will focus members’ attention on the other, perhaps less immediately obvious, parts of the bill—on topics that I and my colleagues believe are equally worthy of prominence in the debate and which perhaps have a wider impact on those living and working in modern Scotland. Modernity is another key theme that I will explore.
I will talk about how the committee set about the task of scrutinising this diverse bill. The bill was introduced in May last year, which afforded us time over the summer months to issue our call for evidence, which closed at the end of September and received 146 responses. The responses came from a wide section of stakeholder groups such as local authorities, drug and alcohol partnerships, equality organisations, energy and transport providers and the police, to name but a few. We also heard from a wide range of interested individuals.