PUBS will be shut down if patrons slam car doors or rev their engines as they leave, magistrates have ruled.

The cumulative effect of low-level rowdiness, such as brawling on the pavement or shouting on the way home, is now enough to force pubs to close early or shut altogether.

One pub in Newcastle has been told that it will be shut immediately if customers throw beer bottles in local skips. Others have been made to install gauges that cut the electricity supply if the noise exceeds an agreed decibel limit.

The Government is encouraging councils to wield their powers aggressively to stop 24-hour drinking, which came into force at midnight on Wednesday, from fuelling alcoholrelated violence and disorder. Take-up of these powers varies around the country, however, and some authorities are more creative than others.

A court in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, for example, has refused to allow a pub in Rickmansworth to open longer because of car doors slamming and people urinating in the streets. The report from the court said that no single incident would attract the attention of the police, but the cumulative effect led the magistrates to reject the pub’s appeal.

“This noise and behaviour is at a low level — by which we mean it consists of shouting, some scrapping, car-door slamming and engine revving, not to mention inappropriate emptying of bladders and stomachs and the like — which is not individually at a level which attracts the attention of the police or the environmental health officers,” the magistrates said. “Nevertheless it is sufficient in aggregate to disturb the local residents substantially, some of whom live cheek-by-jowl with the pub, at an hour they can reasonably expect to be undisturbed.”

A nightclub in West Yorkshire is facing possible closure after a police raid found that 80 per cent of the drinkers were under age. More than 420 of the 500 people packed into the Tramshed Zoo Bar in Halifax, West Yorkshire, were younger than 18.

Undercover police officers posing as pub customers in Devon and Cornwall are to hand out fines to bar staff who serve visibly drunk customers. The police say that they will rigidly enforce the new £80 fixed-penalty notices, and have changed shift patterns to cope with the repercussions of longer opening hours.

The sweeping liberalisation of the licensing laws face their first big test this weekend. The police are nervously waiting to see how the public respond to the availability of alcohol after 11pm in more than 70,000 premises across the country.

The first few hours after the new legislation came into force passed off relatively peacefully. The Licensing Act 2003 came into force at midnight on Wednesday. A handful of pubs are believed to have shut their doors at 11.20pm and re-opened 40 minutes later. A survey of police forces found that the evening passed without incident.

VIEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

El Pais

Only the war in Iraq and the ban on foxhunting have caused a similar level of controversy, over an aspect of life that is taken for granted on the Continent

Chicago Tribune

Getting drunk has become a point of pride in British culture

The Australian

Here is the nightmare scenario painted by opponents: town centres aflame with alcohol-fuelled violence, the streets awash with the vomit of teenage girls; a huge increase in rape, STDs and vicious assaults

Die Welt

Who can really control their drinking in a country where there is no compulsory identity document apart from a driving licence?

Le Parisien

For the country of tepid beer, drank in immoderate quantities and in very short times, this is a revolution

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