Store wins landmark liquor case

Auckland's newest 24-hour supermarket, the inner-city Foodtown, has won a landmark case which means it no longer has to demand identification from people under the age of 25 who want to buy alcohol.

The Liquor Licensing Authority has ruled that a condition to ensure all under-25s produced identification was unreasonable, unlawful and stopped people aged between 18 and 25 legitimately buying alcohol.

The condition is standard on all Auckland City liquor licences for supermarkets, bottle shops and other off-licence outlets.

In a just-released ruling, chairman Judge Edward Unwin and authority member John Crookston said only Parliament could change the Sale of Liquor Act to impose the condition.

At a hearing last month, regional security manager for Foodtown Gary Swan said the supermarket operated a zero tolerance policy towards breaches of the act and drummed this into employees with rigorous training and seminars.

It was company policy to request identification for all customers appearing to be under the age of 25 and the company ran its own "sting" operations using 18-year-olds. Despite this there was still a failure rate of about 15 per cent, Mr Swan said.

The company sought to have the condition taken out of its liquor licence, which was issued by the Auckland District Licensing Agency on June 25 last year.

Foodtown said because it had systems in place for staff to seek identification, the condition was unreasonable, excessive and unlawful.

Foodtown said it would accept a condition requiring people who appeared to be under 18 years to produce identification.

Four years ago, the police, district licensing agency inspectors, Auckland Regional Public Health Service, Alcohol Healthwatch and Auckland City Road Safety Co-Ordinators formed a regional alcohol project that supported making "ID under 25" a condition of liquor licences in Auckland City.

After taking legal advice, the police did not oppose Foodtown's application to delete the condition but the Auckland District Licensing Agency and Alcohol Healthwatch did. Agency inspector Gary Whittle said the condition had become standard on all liquor licences since September 2001 and had not been appealed against until now.

Anna Maxwell, of the regional alcohol project, suggested at the hearing that Foodtown did not want the condition to be part of its licence because it was not confident about its systems and might be concerned that a failure to ask for identification would render it in breach of the act.

A researcher for the Centre for Social and Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation (Shore), Kim Conway, said national alcohol surveys showed that the number of 16 and 17-year-olds buying alcohol from supermarkets rose from 8 per cent in 1995 to 15 per cent in 2000.

In their ruling, Judge Unwin and Mr Crookston said the agency had no statutory backing to impose the condition. "Requesting identification of anyone looking under 25 years of age is a voluntary policy which has been progressively adopted by members of the hospitality industry."

They said the age of 25 was arbitrary and could just as easily have been 20 or 30.

The condition posed a number of problems, one of which was stopping people between 18 and 25 from being able to buy alcohol if they were unable to produce identification.

"In our view, we cannot impose a condition which runs contrary to the act," the ruling said. "We cannot elevate age verification from a potential defence to a proactive duty. It is Parliament which must do that."