London borough demands greater powers over 'lawless' shisha cafes

Local authorities must be given more powers to shut down unregulated shisha cafes as loopholes in Government legislation allow venues to reopen “virtually overnight”, Brent Council has said.

The London borough said that out of the 47 known shisha venues in its area, some 39 were not compliant with UK law.

Despite the council using the legislation available to prosecute non-compliant venues, such as the Health Act 2006, the ability of cafes to reopen very quickly undermined efforts to tackle antisocial behaviour, it added.

In the past four months Brent has brought 43 prosecutions against shisha cafés for various offences, resulting in approximately £114,033 of fines and costs.

The council suggested that many of the shisha café operators seemed “to see the risk of prosecution as less important than the profit that can be made from selling shisha”.

It added that unregulated shisha cafes were posing a growing problem with complaints of noise nuisance, antisocial behaviour and violent incidents on the rise.

In a letter to Home Secretary Amber Rudd, Cllr Muhammed Butt, Leader of Brent, called for the introduction of new legislation recognising shisha as a licensable activity by law and giving local authorities the powers “to regulate and enforce effectively and provide credible deterrents - including increased fines - for venues that continue to break the law”.

Cllr Butt said: “There is only so much local authorities and the Police can do within the current legislation. The Government needs to stop ignoring this issue and start taking notice of these unlicensed, unaccountable shisha venues before someone dies. We are running around in circles at the moment and even when we manage to close a café, due to antisocial behaviour, it can reopen virtually overnight.

“We need the Home Secretary to give us the powers to take a zero tolerance approach to lawless shisha cafes so we can clampdown on the antisocial behaviour they generate and make our borough safer for everyone.”

Cllr Butt claimed that some shisha café owners were making £25,000 a week and that a £3,000 fine was “just loose change to them” and did nothing to improve behaviour.