Agenda item

This report proposes an increase of fees for those licensing regimes where the council has the power to set its own fees for 2025 – 26. The fee increases will enable the council to recover its costs in managing and administering these licensing regimes. There is one new charge “promotional activity/product sampling” proposed for administrative procedures for these matters.

Ms Daliah Barret, Licensing Team Leader, introduced the report.

The Committee heard:

·      The figure of 5% had been provided by the Council’s Finance Officer.

·      In relation to promotional activity, some businesses wanted to engaged with the public and sign-up new customers. More often than, not they wanted to use a van and have a trailer left on the pavement overnight. This was what the cost was there for. There were some commodities that were not allowed promotion. This included tobacco, smoking related matters, nothing promoting alcohol or gambling.

·      The fees were entirely new fees being set for promotional activities.

·      The street trading account should be done on its own, but was done corporately at Haringey. 

·      The Council was not making a surplus and the fees should probably be set higher. The fees meant to be able to cover officer’s time to do enforcement also. However, for officers going out every couple of weeks to even monitor a Tottenham Hotspur match and having to deal with the illegal street traders outweighed the budget that the Council had. It would be unfair if the Council put the extra amount of cost on the ten or so registered Street Traders in the borough as this would be quite a significant increase for them to have to make.

·      The match day traders pay their fees as normal but during an event, there was a separate fee also in for traders to trade on an event day. This was how the Council tried to recuperate some cost to pay for the officers that had to work on those days.

·      The Council could not deal with what happened inside a supermarket, but was responsible for what happened on the public highway. This was why the Council needed to be able to say ’yes’ or ‘no’ to certain types of promotional activities and have safeguards in place around this. Health promotions such as Cancer Research spend a week on the public highway and there would be no charge for this because that was a public health benefit.

·      In relation to fundraising organization, the Council already had an agreement with the fundraising Regulators let the Council know when charities were coming to the area to come and sign people up. These organisations could go about their business in the borough. What the Council dealt with was the complaints that came in from the public being accosted to sign-up to an organisation.

·      Any market taking place within a premises was not subject to the Council’s consideration. The market at Tottenham Green was supported by the Council’s economic development team. An individual had been assigned as the market operator who charged a fee of each individual trader coming to attend the market. It could be argued that the fee should not be charged because it was not for the operator to charge the trader, it was for the Council to make the charge because it was on the public highway. The fees put in place were extremely reasonable.

·      In relation to the NFL fencing off an area for promotional activity at Tottenham Hotspur stadium, a charge was placed for this. 

·      Promotional activity fell within the street trading legislation. Charities were seen to be exempt in terms of street trading. However, if they put things on the street and placing things on the public highway, then they then would start incurring costs.

·      Traditional stalls were the seven designated spaces that the Council had agreed. These were not be given up because the legislation had succession rights. Eight requests or so per -year were received for a stall at Tottenham High Road and these were always refused because there was no space to make any new stalls and the designated ones would be ones passed down on to the trader’s families. The non-traditional ones were three stalls that were in an individual’s front yard. Those were given as temporary stalls that were renewed every six months or so.

RESOLVED:

1.      To approve fees set out in appendix 1 of the report, namely an increase of 5% on existing discretionary fees for 2025 – 26 and the introduction of promotional activity fees as set out in section 5.7 of the report.

2.      To note Licensing Act and Gambling Act premises fees were already set at statutory maximums and make up a significant proportion of the fees collected.