|
|
Booze deregulation leads to 11% drop in violent crime hear this news. Deregulation leads to less crime - the facts don't lie. Violence down amid pub law change Violent crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales fell by 11% at the end of last year, despite longer pub opening hours coming in, figures show. The Home Office figures for the last three months of 2005 target alcohol-related crime. The figures are the first since licensing laws were changed in November to allow extended drinking hours. Police have said it will take longer to buttess the full impact of the changes. Half of all violent crime is linked to excessive drinking and the government had been waiting to see how the figures would be affected by longer opening hours for pubs and clubs. To nip potential problems in the bud, the Home Office gave the police and trading standards departments £2.5m to target binge drinking between 12 November and Christmas. With more officers on the streets at night, violent crime went down by 11% overall, with an even sharper fall in more serious types of offence, the figures show. However, BBC crime correspondent Neil Bennett said it was not possible to draw firm conclusions about the effects of extended opening hours from these figures alone. He said: "The extra money to tackle drink-related violence has now run out and - as the figures for mugging showed recently - when specially targeted operations stop, so crime tends to go up again." When the new licensing laws came in on 24 November, police forces said the full implications would not be clear for at least six months. At the time, about 1,000 premises had 24-hour licences, with thousands more licensed to extend opening times by only one or two hours.
|
||||||
