‘Tis the time to lodge TENs for Christmas and New Year

Eleanor Jordan, Solicitor

Make sure your premises is prepared to maximise on festive cheer this year by lodging your TENs for Christmas and New Year now.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘TEN’, this stands for a Temporary Events Notice, which is effectively a temporary licence that can be used for many purposes, for example permitting you to trade for longer hours.

This will be particularly useful this year with both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve falling on a Tuesday. This means that if there are no special permissions on your licence to trade later on these dates, you will need to adhere to your Tuesday hours. That is unless you lodge a TEN for those evenings.

Equally, even if your premises licence does benefit from special permissions or non-standard timings on these dates, it is possible that this doesn’t apply to all licensable activities. If you find this is the case and you are not permitted to provide regulated entertainment or late-night refreshment for as long as you require, you can lodge TENs to address this.

Another way to utilise TENs over the Christmas period is to temporarily licence an unlicensed part of your premises to increase your capacity thereby enhancing your offering to those organising private events.

You could also temporarily add licensable activities to your premises licence, such as the provision of live or recorded music to attract more customers.

As you may be aware, each premises can have up to 15 separate TENs per year, covering up to a total of 21 days per year and this allowance will renew again in 2025. That means that the festive season can also be a perfect way of using up any TENs you may still have left over in your allowance for this year.

There are clearly many reasons to lodge TENs for this Christmas and New Year. However, to reap these benefits and meet the demands of the holiday hustle, it is important not to leave lodging your TENs until last minute. This is because the festive period is only just around the corner and an ordinary TEN must be lodged 10 clear working days prior to an event and up to 5 clear working days is needed for a late TEN.

If you would like to lodge TENs for the fast-approaching Christmas season, our Licensing team would be delighted to help. Please contact us on 0161 832 3434 or info@kuits.com.