Half of Senior Licensed Trade Staff In Tourism Hotspots Face Alcohol Sales Ban

With figures available for just half of Scotland's licensing boards, already 7,000 permits allowing the sale of booze have been revoked.

A 'personal licence' holder is required to be in any pub, club, corner shop and even hotel or restaurant when alcohol is sold, with a significant number of job losses expected as a result of the ongoing moves.

For businesses where the manager is also the personal licence holder only six weeks are given for a fully-trained replacement to be found or no alcohol can be sold.

It was revealed yesterday the carnage facing the hospitality and retail sectors as a result of thousands failing to meet legal requirements to retrain by the end of November.

In Argyll and Bute, 425 of 900 workers holding personal licences are having them revoked. The area's licensing board is convening a special meeting tomorrow (Friday) to formally announce the move.

In Fife, 776 licences are being revoked, in North Lanarkshire it is 338, or around a third of the total, South Ayrshire has seen almost 300 workers banned and in Renfrewshire it is 288.

Elsewhere, 286 licences are due to be revoked in Dumfries and Galloway, 253 in East Lothian, 171 in East Lothian and 223 in West Lothian.

Some areas are planning to publicise the names of all those whose licences have been revoked on their local authority websites.

The names of all those who have had their licences revoked are now required to be sent to Police Scotland.

Although the figure will continue to rise it is understood some boards are allowing people who have not completed the training to surrender their licences, therefore saving them from the mandatory five year ban.

Sources have said there are likely scenarios of weddings being cancelled as hotels find themselves without licensed managers early in the New Year.

Stephen McGowan, liquor law specialist and Scottish chairman of trade group BII, which represents hundreds of licensed premises, said: "Although ultimately the failure to comply with these requirements sits with the personal licence holder, at the very least this whole debacle demonstrates the lack of awareness of what the laws are.

The licensing laws of Scotland are now so unfathomable, scattered as they are across various sources, that even the few true specialists struggle.

"This whole episode is a car crash of mammoth proportions. When 7000 licences are revoked, and the true number may be as many as 10,000, then something somewhere is clearly wrong.

Licensing boards have no option but to revoke the licence if the deadline is missed. There is no appeal. The five year ban on reapplying for a licence is worse than that handed down to a drug-taking Olympian."

A Police Scotland spokesman said it was "business as usual" for the force which would continue to visit licensed premises checking if all documentation was up to date.