The National Certificate for Personal Licence Holders (NCPLH) is well known throughout the licensed trade as the ‘must have’ qualification when applying for a Personal Licence that authorises the sale of alcohol in licensed premises. Versions of this qualification are offered by a variety of awarding bodies and all were originally accredited by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) at Level 2 in the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), or National Database of Accredited Qualifications (NDAQ) as it later became known.

The NCPLH is going to be renamed and the new name will be: Level 2 Award for Personal Licence Holders. You will start to see this title being used from August 2010 onwards, along with the abbreviation APLH rather than NCPLH. The APLH will continue to be delivered as a one-day course with a 40 question multiple-choice exam at the end of it.

Why the change?
Changes to policy designed to simplify qualifications have now resulted in the creation of ‘Ofqual’ as the qualifications regulator, and a new Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) to replace NDAQ.

Paul Chase, Director and Head of UK Compliance at CPL Training has led the discussion with other awarding bodies, on behalf of awarding body EDI, to create a new ‘shared unit’ for NCPLH. This will sit at Level 2 on the Qualifications and Credit Framework. Essentially this has involved migrating the existing NCPLH qualification, with some amendments, from NDAQ onto the new QCF. The discussions on the new Unit have been chaired by Angela Yahaya of People 1st, who fully support the submission to QCF.

How does the QCF work?
Under the new QCF every unit and qualification in the framework will have a credit value (one credit represents 10 notional learning hours, showing how much time and effort it takes to complete) and a level between ‘entry’ and level 8 (showing how difficult it is).

There are three sizes of qualifications in the QCF:
• Awards (between 1 and 12 credits)
• Certificates (between 13 and 36 credits)
• Diplomas (37 credits or more)

So in the new framework you can have an ‘Award’ at level 1 or at Level 8. This is because the qualification type ‘award, certificate, diploma’ represents the size of the qualification, not how difficult it is. The degree of difficulty is represented by the level – ‘Level 1’, ‘Level 2’ and so on. Simply by looking at the title of a qualification you will be able to see how difficult it is, how long it will take the average learner to complete, and its general content.

CPL Training is working with awarding body EDI to migrate all of the licensed retail-related qualifications we offer on to the new Qualifications and Credit Framework.

A variety of terms have been coined to describe those who want ever greater restrictions on the sale of alcohol: ‘Neo-prohibitionists’ and ‘New Puritans’ being the most frequently used. The more I read the increasingly hysterical criticisms of the alcohol-producing and retailing industries - the incessant moral panic - the more convinced I become that the irrational, hard-line ideological view of alcohol coming from the health lobby is based on a kind of paranoia or phobia – hence the term ‘Alcophobia’!

What do Alcophobics believe? Firstly, that it is the substance of alcohol itself that is “the problem”; they believe that problems that are ‘alcohol-related’ means the same thing as ‘caused by’. Secondly, they believe that it’s the availability of alcohol that causes people to drink it. Alcophobes view ‘availability’ as being akin to temptation – the more availability, the more temptation there is, the more people are likely to lose their willpower and give in by drinking to excess! In essence, the Alcophobic view is that the factors that drive chronic drinking and binge drinking are primarily located in the production of alcohol (brewing, distilling etc) and in the way in which the retail distribution system markets and sells alcoholic drinks products.

The policy prescriptions that flow from this false, ideological view are therefore all about restriction: restricting the number of premises selling alcohol; restricting hours of opening; restricting advertising and promotions; raising the minimum age of purchase and restricting availability by using the tax system to raise price. These policy prescriptions are entirely logical provided only that you buy into the delusional internal architecture of Alcophobic thinking! In this ‘back to the future’ approach to dealing with alcohol abuse it doesn’t matter how many people in the industry have received training in social responsibility, or sat their NCPLH course, the industry is viewed as delinquent! Alcophobes therefore seek the suppression of the mass market for alcohol by restricting production and distribution. The apotheosis of this approach was, of course, the era of prohibition in the United States between 1919 and 1933, which was an absolute economic and social disaster.

Is there an alternative analysis of the causes of chronic drinking and binge drinking? One that looks at root causes and that isn’t rooted in scape-goating? Yes there is. ‘Chronic drinking’ is what we used to call ‘alcoholism’. Historically alcoholism was always driven by poverty. Although the nature of poverty today isn’t what it was in the 19th century – we don’t have mass unemployment and mass, absolute poverty – we do have significant regional pockets of high, intergenerational unemployment and this is a major driver of chronic drinking. The other main driver is pensioner poverty. The UK has more people aged over 55 than under 25 and breaking the link between pensions and earnings has ensured the erosion of living standards for the elderly. This factor, coupled with the growing social isolation of the elderly poor has contributed greatly to the increase in chronic drinking in this age group.

What of ‘binge drinking’? Again, I believe that the main factors driving this social trend have little to do with cheap beer or ‘pre-loading’, but instead it is driven by the growth of the underclass and by the six-fold increase in student numbers that we’ve seen over the past 30 years. This curious social dynamic sees the sons and daughters of an underclass of seemingly permanently deprived families mixing in town centres with the sons and daughters of the middle class, and being pumped through a pre-existing partying-to-excess  youth culture that revolves around binge drinking and illegal drug use.

What all four of these drivers of maladaptive drinking patterns have in common is that they map across to government policy and political failure. But why blame government and politics when it is much more fun to engage in a bit of cheap, populist supermarket bashing? Our industry is too often used as a whipping-boy by politicians keen to avoid a rational debate about the real causes of chronic drinking and binge drinking.

text-align:justify;">Hardly a day goes by without another assault on the alcohol retailing industry from health campaigners or the media. Recently health campaigners have concentrated on the issue of minimum pricing as providing a silver bullet for the perceived problems of our drinking culture. A Channel 4 News piece recently typified the simplistic approach of tabloid television to our industry. Filmed against the bleak backdrop of the northeast of England the Channel 4 report recited the neo-prohibitionist myth that it’s the availability of alcohol that makes people drink it, and cheap beer from supermarkets was particularly singled out as the cause of 'pre-loading' by young drinkers before going on a night out. The simple solution? Minimum pricing to push up cost and thus reduce consumption!

It's as if our journalists have forgotten that in the northeast we have large-scale intergenerational unemployment with thousands of men standing idle. The shipyards on the Tyne have closed, the steel works at Redcar are gone and hundreds of businesses in the supply chains to these industries have closed. Unemployment and the poverty, marital breakdown and personal demoralisation this leads to have far more to do with alcoholism than how the retail distribution system markets boxes of beer. This Channel 4 piece is but one example of how our sector is scape-goated for the failure of politicians to deal effectively with intractable social problems outside of our control. Poverty and unemployment has always been a main driver of alcohol abuse. The best way to tackle binge drinking amongst young people in the Northeast, and elsewhere, is to provide apprenticeships and other teaching and learning opportunities that provide practical steps to work for young people.

From July 2010 we will see changes to SIA licence-linked training requirements for people who want to work in door security. The SIA have taken a very tentative step forward in introducing ‘physical interventions’ training. A one-day course in techniques for holding, disengaging and escorting will become one of the requirements. With health and safety in mind, and with a number of high-profile cases where door supervisors have found themselves on the receiving end of a manslaughter charge as a result of deaths from ‘positional asphyxiation’ (holding them down and depressing the chest cavity), the aim is to introduce techniques that are compatible with law and apply the principle of minimum force.

The fact is that door supervisors are frequently the victims of assault and the physical intervention techniques being taught are only going to work on compliant or semi-compliant subjects. If a drunken or drug-intoxicated person wriggles free from a ‘hook-and-turn’ technique, and offers serious violence, the physical interventions being taught will not tell the door supervisor what to do next!

The new physical interventions training will not only apply to new applicants for the SIA door security licence, but also to existing door supervisors when they come to renew their existing licence.