A TOWN centre shop has agreed to stop flogging super-strength booze as part of a crackdown to reduce the sale of strong beers and lager favoured by street drinkers.
Some off-licences are selling cans of imported lager with an alcohol strength as high as nine per cent for as little as £1 per can, fuelling anti-social behaviour problems particularly among street drinkers.
In a bid to tackle the problem, Barnsley Council launched a ‘Reduce the Strength’ scheme where officers work with licensed premises in the town centre to reduce the availability of high strength cans of beer, lager and cider.
At a special meeting of the statutory licensing regulatory board on Tuesday, enforcement officer Debbie Bailey told councillors it had seen some success.
She said: “We have one off-licence in the town centre that has already voluntarily agreed to have his premises licence conditioned to state he won’t sell beer over 6.5 per cent strength in single cans or bottles.”
Debbie said ‘can marking’ operations are now being carried to work out which off-licences are failing to work with officers, which involves tracing discarded cans of super-strength booze back to the retailers selling them.
There have been two operations to date, with the latest taking place on Monday.
During the first, 90 discarded cans were picked up from Peel Parade, the Pinfold Steps off Shambles Street and Sparrow Park at Town End.
Manufacturers’ codes were taken from those cans and compared with codes on cans being sold in four main town centre off-licences.
Councillors were told a number of cans matched the ones being currently sold - indicating they were from the same batch.
Another litter pick of the same areas was carried out and the process of identifying the main sources repeated.
Debbie said: “On Monday we did another litter pick of the same areas with a view to clearing everything out to give us a blank canvas and another litter pick will be done on Wednesday and what we will find will only be cans discarded in the last 48 hours and we can go back to licensed premises with the batch numbers and work with the premises we think are failing.”
She said officers will speak to licensees and continue to work with them to prevent the sale of high strength booze.
Councillors were told for those premises identified as failing to work with officers and continuing to sell high strength single cans of beer, lager and cider - contributing to the litter and antisocial behaviour in the town centre - officers may consider applying for a review of their premises licence.
