I've been meaning to post on this for a little while now. Back in April, Eric Crampton pointed to Police and the Medical Officer of Health using incorrect data on the number of licences in Wellington as part of their submissions opposing alcohol licences. Sadly, for those of us who know about the alcohol licensing data in New Zealand, this sort of outcome won't come as a surprise.
Current alcohol licence data is available for free from the Ministry of Justice website. However, the quality of that data is somewhat questionable. It doesn't take long to realise that there are problems. For example, I downloaded the latest data, and looked at Waikato District (which I know reasonably well, as I am a Commissioner of the District Licensing Committee there). Looking only at on-licences, McGinty's bar in Huntly appears in the list twice. Fortunately, it looks like that's the only duplicate in the Waikato data for on-licences, but it would not surprise me at all to find out that there are many duplicates for Wellington. So, simply getting the free data and counting the number of licences in that data is going to over-state the number of licences.
I think that this particular issue arises because, when a new licence is granted to new owners of an existing premises, the previous licence remains in the dataset until it expires. Once you know that it is an issue, identifying duplicates and removing them is straightforward (although not helped by the dataset having only street names and not street numbers in the address fields).
However, there is a bigger issue with the dataset. It is only updated when the local council updates the Alcohol Regulatory and Licensing Authority (ARLA, which is part of the Ministry of Justice). If the local council doesn't send updates very regularly (or at all), then the dataset can quickly get woefully out of date.
So, as one example, according to the latest dataset, there is only one licensed premise in the entirety of the South Taranaki District, and only two in the entirety of Waitaki District. Obviously, the data are incorrect there, and almost certainly because those districts are not updating ARLA when new licences are issued, or existing licences are renewed. So, the licences drop out of the dataset as they 'expire', when they are really being renewed and ARLA just doesn't know.
This is essentially the reason that I have hit 'pause' on research on alcohol outlets across the country as a whole (while maintaining some research in Hamilton City and South Auckland, where I know the quality of data is high). We really need a more reliable source of data than the dataset that ARLA maintains and makes available through the Ministry of Justice website. To be clear, I don't think it's ARLA's fault here at all. I strongly suspect that the dataset is sub-par because ARLA aren't being supported by the councils actually updating them, as is mandated by the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act. A large part of the problem is probably that there doesn't appear to be any sanction against councils that fail to update ARLA.
One day, when I have a lot of spare resources (especially time, but also funding), we may be able to pull together a reasonable dataset that could avoid all of these problems. It would likely require a whole bunch of LGOIMA requests of councils that don't make their licensing decisions available online (again, as requires by the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act), and a lot of effort. Some day.
In the meantime, we should spare a thought for those that want to use data on the number of alcohol licences (in Wellington, or anywhere else). The data that they are being asked to work with is not fit for purpose.
No comments:
Post a Comment