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To be or not to be Licensed - Act 1
23/4/12
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To be or not to be licensed - Act 1 In the first part of a two act feature, ETO’s Wordsman Paul Smith looks at the pros and cons of being licensed and asks whether it’s better for retailers to suffer the slings and arrows of sex establishment fees or act against a sea of troubles and by being unlicensed, end them?
Erotic Trade Only May 2012
Friends, retailers, countrymen, lend me your rabbit ears... Adult retail in the UK is some of the most regulated, complex, and above-all unfair areas of sales to be it. Not only do you have all the usual pressures of store ownership to worry about - rates, bills, stock management, shoplifters, staffing problems and unscrupulous landlords - you can also have aggressive campaigns against your business from a variety of sources, unsympathetic councillors and a true postcode lottery when it comes to an antiquated and increasingly unworkable licensing structure. It’s become almost Shakespearian in its tragicomedy. When ETO investigated the situation a couple of years ago, we were stunned by the enormous disparities and inconsistencies within the Sex Establishment Licence system. One retailer was paying little more than £500 a year for a licence, while others were seeing pocket change from £21,000. Who needed a licence was, if anything, even less fair. At least the charge is transparent; you know what the local fees are when you apply for a licence. Whether they need one at all really is a shot in the dark for many adult retailers. When we asked the relevant authorities what constituted a shop requiring a sex licence, many even most - were vague. The problem at the heart of this is the law says ‘a significant portion’ of the business must be ‘sex article’ related for it to need to be licensed, but there’s no consensus on what constitutes a significant portion (a variety of figures between 5% and 33% were suggested by councils and licensing authorities, who couldn’t agree whether that should be by item numbers, wall space, sales turnover or
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margin value to the business...) or even what defines a sex article. Given the inherent greyness, many councils told us they ‘play it by ear’, looking at each application on a case by case basis. Or to put it another way, you could have two identical shops, with identical stock and sales, and one would need to be licensed and the other wouldn’t, pretty much on whim. As William said, it smells to heaven.
The great decider is R18 DVDs. Unless you like having stock seized and court visits, you’re unlikely to be selling these without a licence. If you do and are, then you’re probably selling unclassified films (in for a penny...). Other products and their mix might be negotiable with your local licensing authority, but if you want to sell
hardcore pornography on DVD (or ye olde VHS), you’re going to need a sex establishment licence. Unless your shop is in an area without broadband, you’ll have noticed a steady decline in DVD sales over the last six years or so, since faster web connections became more
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