A1 or A3 licence - An Explanation

Are you considering opening your own cafe? Do you know anything about the ‘licences to trade’ in the UK and the restrictions these place on a business. Have you ever wondered about the difference between a cafe and a shop or a restaurant or a pub or a showroom?

Basically it is this, or at least this is my understanding and story. The council, or government, allocate a licence to trade to each building. Here are some examples:

Class A1. Shops
Use for all or any of the following purposes— (a) for the retail sale of goods other than hot food, (b) as a post office, (c) for the sale of tickets or as a travel agency, (d) for the sale of sandwiches or other cold food for consumption off the premises, (e) for hairdressing, (f) for the direction of funerals, (g) for the display of goods for sale, (h) for the hiring out of domestic or personal goods or articles, (i) for the reception of goods to be washed, cleaned or repaired, where the sale, display or service is to visiting members of the public.Class A2. Financial and professional services
Use for the provision of — (a) financial services, or (b) professional services (other than health or medical services), or (c) any other services (including use as a betting office) which it is appropriate to provide in a shopping area, where the services are provided principally to visiting members of the public.Class A3. Food and drink
Use for the sale of food or drink for consumption on the premises or of hot food for consumption off the premises.

PART BClass B1. Business
Use for all or any of the following purposes— (a) as an office other than a use within class A2 (financial and professional services), (b) for research and development of products or processes, or (c) for any industrial process, being a use which can be carried out in any residential area without detriment to the amenity of that area by reason of noise, vibration, smell, fumes, smoke, soot, ash, dust or grit.

So the shop for Kaffeine is an A1 licence, as are all the s…bucks, costas, prets etc and probably most other independent cafes. Being A1 means you are primarily for the sale of take away food and of course coffee or tea. But the question is, how much food can you prepare, of what type and what methods can you use to prepare it? Can you cook on site at all?

For example, can you do cooked bacon and eggs on a plate for service? Does this fit in with council guidelines? Can you actually cook on the premises at all? What about soup or porridge? We cook virtually everything, but we do not cook to order, we only ‘prepare food primarily for the retail sale and we also heat food as required for consumption’.

Before opening, this was a major question for us, and luckily I had the advice of the Taylor Street baristas owners to guide me, thank goodness for them! So we started cooking on site, preparing all our food as you know it.

Then, about six months ago, we were investigated by council on whether we are breaching the license conditions because we had installed an extraction canopy in order to ventilate the kitchen and because of this they assumed we were cooking large commercial quantities.

For this I had to give them our menus, a list of all our equipment, a breakdown of our sales and the relation between take away and eat in, how many seats we have, how many customers we serve per week. It was a six page document that took ages to fill in.

They also came and visited, twice actually, and took photos, asked questions, had a good look around.

They came back to us with their decision that we were trading as per the lawful guidelines of an A1 licence, which was great news, but that we should possibly investigate having less seats. (We seat 24 people at any one time, but we serve over 600 per day).

My understanding now is that the council really do not have strict guidelines either, or that the lines are so blurred or they do not have consistency in their decisions between them, so it is a really difficult and potentially frustrating area.

At the ends of it though, we are very very happy with their decision  as we believed we were doing the right thing all along, and we hope that you are happy too, because you are ‘legally’ allowed to enjoy our menu this week.

Peter Dore-Smith
Director
Kaffeine Ltd
66 Great Titchfield st.
15 Eastcastle st.