The council is about to be handed a power over its own high streets that it has asked for repeatedly, and the licence it will have least to do with is registered in Gibraltar with no premises attached to it.
Liverpool City Council decides a great deal about what opens on Ranelagh Street, County Road and Bold Street: it sets the licensing hours, and it polices the pavements. For one category of premises, though, it has spent nearly two decades being told what its answer has to be.
Twenty years of being told to say yes
The city has held Purple Flag accreditation every year since the scheme began in 2010, and the assessors who renewed it for a sixteenth time in February singled out the council’s own licensing officers alongside City Watch and the taxi marshals. The council knows its way around a licensing decision, and it goes back at operators after the fact. When a fan zone opened opposite the new Everton stadium last year the council had granted the licence, then opened an investigation into the venue over operating without planning permission.
A licence and a planning consent are separate instruments. Planning asks whether the use belongs on that street; licensing only asks whether the applicant is fit to run it. On one class of application the council effectively held neither.
Section 153 of the Gambling Act 2005 requires a licensing authority to aim to permit premises wherever an application meets the Act, the Gambling Commission’s guidance and the three licensing objectives. Officers could recommend refusal and the application would still succeed, because the law instructed the authority to begin from yes. Thirty eight councils, Greater Manchester among them, campaigned for years to have the rule dropped. Section 87 of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 finally lets an authority publish a gambling impact assessment naming the parts of its area where further premises licences would be inconsistent with the licensing objectives, and adult gaming centres in England are being moved into a planning use class of their own.
The licence with no premises
Here is where the new power runs out, and it is worth being precise about why. Ladbrokes has been a fixture on Merseyside high streets for decades, but its online business does not run on a Liverpool licence or anything like one. It operates under Gambling Commission account number 54743, held by LC International Limited, whose head office on the public register is a suite in Gibraltar.
That single licence has been active since July 2019 and carries sixteen trading names and fifteen domain names. The number of premises listed against it is nought. One licence, sixteen brands, no shopfront anywhere, and no role for a licensing committee in any of it.
None of that is guessable from a brand name, which is the practical problem for anyone trying to work out who they are dealing with. A published record of which UK online casinos sit under which licence holder is built on exactly that check: matching an operator’s number against the Commission’s public register comes before any question of games or payouts, and a number that cannot be found there is treated as a reason not to deposit at all.
This matters for the new power because an assessment has to set out its evidence, and the presumption it creates can be rebutted by an applicant who shows their premises would be consistent with the objectives after all. So the council does not simply get to say no. It has to build a case, street by street, out of things it can count. It can count the shop on County Road. It cannot count 54743, which has no address in the city and never will.
What the Prime Minister announced
Andy Burnham, who took office in July, confirmed the direction on a visit to Ilkeston on 11 August. ‘The rise of vape shops, betting shops and rogue operators have replaced the shops, services, and community spaces that people are crying out for,’ he said. ‘We’re putting communities back in control and giving local people a real say over what opens on their high street.’
What is actually filling the units
The wider question is what replaces a closed shop, and Liverpool’s answer is more mixed than the national story suggests. The Lewis’s building on Ranelagh Street, home to one of England’s first department stores when it opened in 1856, went on the market in June, while Uniqlo announced a city centre store back in 2024. Independents around Bold Street have held up better than equivalents elsewhere.
Cllr Laura Robertson-Collins, cabinet member for Communities, Neighbourhoods and Streetscene, made the council’s case for its stewardship of the centre when the Purple Flag was renewed. ‘Liverpool is a city that continues to grow year on year,’ she said, calling the award ‘testament to the hard work our officers and partners put in every day of the year’.
What happens next
Neither change is switched on. The detail of the August announcement commits the government to consulting first, and an impact assessment only bites once an authority has written one and evidenced it. That is a real cost, for a council that has spent the past year bringing services back in house to control what it spends.
What the city ends up with is a veto over the premises it can see, and no standing at all over a Gibraltar company with sixteen brands and no front door. That is a better position than it has held since 2005. It is not the same as control.