The Government’s recent shake-up in licensing laws has given police forces and council strengthened powers over pubs and clubs.

While this is welcome, the Government is also considering weakening the obligation of alcohol-selling establishments to notify residents of any changes they intend to make to their licences.

Currently they have to notify residents via the local media.

However, the Government is considering scrapping this and allowing them to do this via the council website instead.

It would be remiss of me to pretend local papers do not have a financial interest here, as it would mean a loss of revenue from those obligatory adverts.

But the fact remains that a council website is not the main source of local information for many people, especially older ones.

Local newspaper websites reach far more people, while printed newspapers can inform those who do not have access to the internet and want to keep abreast of these matters.

As has been seen with recent licence issues, such as those surrounding Area nightclub and Queens Road, they have a profound impact on those who live nearby.

As such, the onus should be for such companies to use both new and older forms of media to let as many as possible people know when they are looking to change their licence. This is not an area in which to merely pay lip service.

 

On the surface it appears to be a trivial change. In the next few months the Harlequin Shopping Centre will change its name to intu Watford.

The move is part of a national rebranding exercise by its operator, Capital Shopping Centres, to intu.

After this rebrand the physical building will still be there as will all the same shops.

People will be free to call it the Harlequin and I suspect, for the vast majority in the town, it will remain colloquially thus.

Yet the announcement was met with uproar.

For Capital Shopping Centres it is a corporate rebranding exercise.

For people in Watford it is the removal of a name that has become synonymous with the town centre. The Harlequin looms large in Watford town centre, figuratively as well as literally.

The outcry over the rebrand shows that names matter and at the heart of this is the feeling that people are having something familiar taken away from them.

In other parts of the country, Capital has not gone as far as in Watford in terms of replacing the whole centre’s name.

In Manchester it has interpolated intu into the Trafford Centre’s name, calling it the Intu Trafford Centre.

Surely a similar solution could be found in Watford, which would maintain the Harlequin name – a name the people of Watford have become familiar with over the last few decades and are clearly attached to.