Nobody opens the incident book on a good night. It gets opened after the bad one, by a licensing officer or a solicitor, and what's written in it, or missing from it, is suddenly your whole account of what happened. A well-kept log is the cheapest protection in the building. An empty one, or one that "can't be found", reads like a confession. This is what goes in it, word for word what the licence conditions ask for, and how long to keep it.

Is it actually a legal requirement?

The Licensing Act 2003 itself doesn't say "keep an incident book". What it does is let councils attach conditions to your premises licence, and an incident log is one of the most common conditions there is. Once it's on your licence, it's not best practice, it's mandatory, and not keeping it is a breach that can end up in front of a licensing sub-committee.

Westminster's model conditions, the set many councils copy from, put it like this: an incident log shall be kept at the premises, made available on request to an authorised officer of the council or the police, and completed within 24 hours of the incident. Their refusals condition goes further: the record shall be available for immediate inspection whenever the premises is open.

So the first job is boring but real: get your premises licence out and read the conditions. Plenty of licensees have never read them since the licence transferred, and you can't comply with a condition you've never seen. If there's no log condition on yours, keep one anyway. Council guidance, like Warwick District Council's premises log book, says the forms aren't mandatory in themselves but you must be able to produce records that show you're complying when an authorised officer asks. The book is how you show it.

What counts as an incident

More than fights. Westminster's model condition lists the categories, and it's a sensible checklist for any pub:

  • All crimes reported to the venue
  • All ejections of patrons
  • Any complaints received
  • Any incidents of disorder
  • Any seizures of drugs or offensive weapons
  • Any faults in the CCTV or searching equipment
  • Any refusals of the sale of alcohol
  • Any visit by a relevant authority or emergency service

To that I'd add anything involving an injury or first aid, however minor it looked at the time, and any damage to the building or a vehicle outside. The slip by the fire door that "was nothing" is precisely the entry you'll want three years later when the claim letter arrives.

What to write, entry by entry

The council-issued log books all ask for the same core, and Warwick's is typical: date and time, personal details or a description of the people involved, what happened, what action was taken, and the name of the member of staff recording it. Add witnesses if there were any, and whether police attended, with the incident reference number if one was given.

Two rules make an entry worth something later. Write facts, not opinions: "male in grey hoodie refused service at 22:40, became abusive, left when asked, did not return" survives scrutiny. "Usual idiot kicking off again" does not, and remember anyone named in the book can, in principle, ask to see what you hold about them, because it's personal data. And write it the same shift. The 24-hour limit in the model condition is a maximum, not a target. Memory is at its best before bed and at its worst by the weekend, and an entry dated three days late is worth half one dated that night.

The refusals log is its own record

Refused sales get treated separately in most conditions, and for good reason: it's your Challenge 25 evidence. The model condition wants the date and time of the refused sale and the name of the staff member who refused it. That's the record that saves you when a test purchase goes wrong, because it shows refusal is routine in your building, not a fluke. If your book combines refusals and incidents on the same pages, that's usually fine, as long as either can be produced on demand, refusals immediately.

Write the CCTV reference in the same night

The standard CCTV condition keeps recordings for a minimum of 31 days. That number is why the incident entry needs the camera and time reference written in on the night: "CCTV bar camera 2, 23:10 to 23:25". On day 32 the footage is gone, and an entry that says "on CCTV" with no reference points at nothing. If the incident is anything you might ever need again, export the clip that week and note where it's saved.

Why paper books go wrong

Every pub I've worked has had a paper incident book at some point, and they all fail the same ways. The book lives behind the bar until a refit, then lives nowhere. Entries are written in the small hours in handwriting nobody can read back. A page gets torn out because someone wrote the wrong thing, and a bound book with a missing page looks worse in a hearing than no book at all. Loose-leaf folders are worse again, because nothing proves pages weren't added or removed after the fact.

If you stay on paper: a bound book with numbered pages, one entry after another, no gaps, kept somewhere it survives a refurbishment. Mistake in an entry? Single line through it, initial it, carry on. If you go digital, anything with a timestamp and an audit trail beats a Word document, and it should still be printable on demand, because the condition says available on request, not available once the laptop's found.

The nights it pays you back

A licence review under section 51 of the Act is the big one. Residents or police ask the council to look at your licence, and the sub-committee reads whatever record of your operation exists. A book showing incidents logged, actions taken and patterns dealt with is evidence you're promoting the licensing objectives. Silence is evidence of nothing, and the other side's version fills it.

Then there's the slower stuff. Injury claims can arrive years after the night. Licensing consultants' guidance suggests keeping incident records for one to three years depending on local requirements; I'd keep them at least three, matching the usual window for injury claims, and longer costs you a shelf inch. Your insurer will ask what was recorded at the time, and "nothing" is an expensive answer.

Keep people out of the beer numbers

Last one, because this site is mostly about stock: the incident book is for people, not for beer. A dropped gas bottle, a keg lost to a cellar flood, a till row over a disputed round: by all means log the event, but the stock consequence has to land in your wastage records too, or your next count books it as unexplained loss and you start looking for a thief who's actually a paperwork gap. I've written up how to tell theft from waste from measuring error and what to check when the till and stocktake disagree. If your pubco auditor visits, both books being tidy is half the battle won before they're through the door, as covered in the pubco stock audit guide.

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