HAVING sat on a number of licensing panels in the past few months I think the new licensing laws are seriously flawed.

They raise local residents' expectations that they could have a say in the details of a pub or club licence but in reality the leeway to vary times and conditions are so constrained that there was little that councillors could do to help them.

There should be some way the council could set local guidelines, in the same way it does for planning, so we could decide locally what opening hours we think are acceptable in rural villages, residential areas of town or the city centre.

At the moment what we have is a licensing lottery - almost solely dependent on which councillors sit on each panel and what they think is acceptable.

This will undoubtedly have led to serious anomalies in opening hours across the district. For example, several pubs on the same street may have different conditions and opening hours. It also means that the combined impact of these pubs on people has not been taken into account.

The only glimmer of hope in this whole ill-thought-out scheme is that residents will be able to call for a review of any licence where it is clear the premises are causing a nuisance. This at least gives a second chance to try and sort out the mess that the Government has led us into.

Cllr Chris Coates, Lancaster.