Bars losing millions in chaos on ID cards

[WtD_Oracle]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/articl ... cards.html

Britain's pubs and clubs are in trouble. The smoking ban, recession and the trend towards home entertainment have all taken their toll.

But many venues are turning away millions of pounds worth of potential business as confusion over an identity scheme causes chaos.

And there are warnings that the thousands of youngsters who are genuinely 18 and over but who are being barred from pubs and clubs are buying alcohol at supermarkets and drinking on the streets.

The Proof of Age Standards Scheme (PASS) was hailed as the answer to Britain's epidemic of underage drinking and fake ID cards.

But Robert Humphreys, the chairman of PASS and secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group, said: 'There is a real problem here. Many larger club, pub and bar chains have embraced the scheme and welcome PASS hologram cards as proof of age.

'However, too many bars and clubs are allowing their door staff to turn away responsible young adults with genuine cards, losing them sorely needed custom.'

Genuine cards have a forge-proof hologram and the scheme, launched in 2003, is backed by many organisations including the Home Office, the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Trading Standards Institute, the British Beer and Pub Association and National Pubwatch.

National card schemes carrying the PASS logo include Validate UK, Citizen-Card and YoungScot. There are also many regional card schemes run by local councils.

However research carried out for PASS shows that legal-age teenagers are being turned away nearly two million times every month for failing to provide acceptable ID.

PASS director Kate Winstanley said: 'There has been a communications breakdown in pubs and clubs between head office, who say that they are

totally on board with the scheme, and the door staff, either because they are not getting the message or because some of them are a law unto themselves.'

She said there was a strong likelihood that teenagers turned away from bars could drink in an unsupervised environment.

The numbers of emails sent to PASS complaining about being turned away rocketed this summer, with many saying that door staff did not allow the PASS card even though a sticker in the window said the bar recognised the scheme.

Jess Burton, 18, a film and media studies student at Northumbria University, was refused entry to the Madame Koo bar in Newcastle despite being able to show a PASS card.

'I thought that was really stupid as it's a proper card and backed by the Government, which is why I got it,' said Jess. 'I don't want to take my passport with me and I haven't got a driving licence.'

All door supervision staff in the UK are licensed and regulated by the Security Industry Authority (SIA) and a spokeswoman said that while it did support the PASS initiative, it was up to the individual venues what form of ID they would accept.

While some pub chains have a national policy regarding PASS, others leave it up to individual managers.

Barracuda Group, which owns the Varsity and Smith & Jones pubs, said: 'We recognise the good work that PASS is doing but we are leaving it to the managers' discretion. We don't want to be turning away customers but fraudulent ID is very easy to get hold of.'

But Winstanley said there was a growing trade in fake driving licences, which makes accepting them much more risky than accepting PASS cards. Fake driving licences can be bought over the internet for just £20.

'There is plenty of evidence that there are many fake driving licences around but there hasn't been a single fraudulent PASS card to date,' she said.

'We can't force companies to recognise it but we're saying - here is a watertight scheme which is completely trusted and it doesn't make sense to shut off that income stream.'

Some companies such as JD Wetherspoons, which operates 752 pubs across the country, are trying to spread the message about the card and have requested training tools from PASS so that its staff recognise the scheme.

A spokesman said: 'We do want people to come into our pubs and our door staff are well trained on what cards to accept.

'But it would be naive to think that they get it right every time and some errors do occur. But on the whole we think we have got it about right.'

Thousands of pubs, however, have not and the battle over the PASS cards could mean them turning away thousands of pounds of business this New Year's Eve.

[ballantyne78]

Is this fool living in a fantasy land?

"Not a single fake PASS card to date" They don't cover us in any legal sense, there are 3 genuine examples and hundreds of similar, lookalike jobs. Just take a looka t the sticky at the top of the DS section or the back of any issue of FHM or Loaded etc.

[Gepard]

I shall be contacting Kate Winstanley in the next few days and inviting her to come on here and discuss the current issues with the system. It's apparent from both my own experiences and that of others on here that the issue with PASS isn't the suspectibility to fake reproduction but the lack of checks made when issuing the card initially. It is in our and the industries interest to come up with a suitable method of age verification and it doesn't feel right that we're getting blamed for not accepting a from of ID that is known to have loopholes in a national newspaper. I'm also going out tonight so I'll be asking the venue managers if they support it as I refuse to believe it's just DS that don't.

This requires further action!

[spikegt]

Thats a joke, I was still in school when the first pass cards came out and we just used to put a different DOB on the form. We all had them when 17 saying we were 18.
Going further than that some of us at school used to alter the cards as well. You can easily drill a hole in the DOB at the bottom and then inject more ink or use a small amount of Nail varnish remover to delete something. The hologram might be good but the rest of the card isn't.

[djbt_uk]

On a similar vein, does anyone have a guide to checking the security features on the'new' and controversial national ID card?

They're about to be launched my way.

[fozzy]

Who could say, right now, what a PASS card looks like? I couldn't, therefore if approached with one on the door, I'd refuse to accept it as valid ID. There are so many fakes flooding the market it'd be too risky to accept them, as a general rule.

If the venue support accepting PASS cards, the managers should educate the doorstaff as to how it looks, and any details of fraudulent cards, but it still lies with the HD as to whether or not they're accepted, since it's his neck if they're fake.

[Gepard]

I have contacted Kate Winstanley the PASS director and invited her to this site to discuss and improve the scheme with a link pointing directly at this thread. I know they did attend the Safer Doors conferences a couple of years ago and were heavily critizied then so let's hope Ms Winstanley will take action.

djbt_uk: http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/ac ... 1083357928

Fozzy, the PASS cards security measures is the hologram itself and the big thing with the PASS cards as opposed to the driving licenses and ID cards is that the abuse of the system comes with the issuing of the card. I've yet to see a fake PASS card and there aren't any in the fake ID thread. The general rule is that if it has a PASS hologram you're good to admit entry.

I would like to point out that you are only required to show due diligence when IDing and it would be hard to argue from a legal persepctive you haven't if you have accepted a card supported by the ACPO and Trading Standards.

[fozzy]

Fozzy, the PASS cards security measures is the hologram itself and the big thing with the PASS cards as opposed to the driving licenses and ID cards is that the abuse of the system comes with the issuing of the card. I've yet to see a fake PASS card and there aren't any in the fake ID thread. The general rule is that if it has a PASS hologram you're good to admit entry.

I would like to point out that you are only required to show due diligence when IDing and it would be hard to argue from a legal persepctive you haven't if you have accepted a card supported by the ACPO and Trading Standards.

Fair points about the hologram, are they really impossible to fake?
As for 'due diligence', I for one like to do my job well, so if I don't recognise the card, I won't accept it, hologram or not, and seeing as you've pointed out that the issuing of the cards is so dubious, I'd definitely not accept any. :)

[Gepard]

No, everything is possible to fake - just extremely difficult.

As for doing the job well you could argue that the DS that accepts it and gets that that extra few quid in the tills is better at their job as they're making the venue money without putting them at any risk from a legal perspective. By not accepting it you're turning away a customer and costing the venue money.

(I'm just arguing the toss...I don't accept them easier.)

[Kieran]

There is SO much in the original article that annoys me that I actually don't know where to start!

PASS director Kate Winstanley doesn't seem to have any real idea about the deeper issues surrounding the refusal of many venues to accept her card... Lets start with the CRIMINAL OFFENCES that are committed by anyone tampering with, altering, defacing, copying or supplying false information to secure, a driving licence or passport... and people STILL do that. Therefore does it not follow that anyone who will take such steps EVEN when they are criminal will readily take similar steps in circumstances which mean they aren't illegal? Such as to alter, reproduce or deceitfully obtain a PASS card? Why yes, it does.

I particularly resent Miss Winstanley's attempt to throw mud at the DS who refuse to accept these cards as being a "law unto themselves"... pray tell, what law is being broken when I refuse to accept your "free-with-8-tokens-from-a-weetabix-box" PASS card? Let me help you there: NONE. For bonus points, what law is being broken when someone who is under 18, but uses a PASS card that says they are over 18, gets into a venue and buys alcohol? THE LICENSING ACT. More importantly, who is held responsible? Not the child, not their brain-dead excuses for parents, not the minimum-wage muppet issuing the cards... the door staff.

There is indeed a trade in fake driving licences. But there are materials available from the DVLA which allow DS to familiarise themselves with the security features on driving licences, and the DVLA are MUCH more stringent about issuing licences than the PASS scheme is about issuing their cards. People don't NEED to fake a PASS card, they just lie when they apply for it. That's why we don't accept them - there's no way to verify the validity of any given PASS card.

As for couching half her drivel in business jargon ( "cutting off income streams" etc etc ) - it's not a simple matter of retail/consumer policy, it's LAW. Miss Winstanley may wish to see the country awash with drunk under-18s, but I don't. And until Parliament decides to change the Law regarding the legal drinking age, I can only presume they agree with me and NOT Miss Winstanley.... who clearly has no moral problem with placing the creation of wealth above the protection of children from harm in HER list of priorities.

Finally, Jess Burton: GET A DRIVING LICENCE.You don't even need to pass the test, for crying out loud. I don't care what you think is stupid. I don't care that you don't want to bring your passport out with you - you take it on HOLIDAY and manage not to lose it. I don't care what YOU regard as a "proper" card (whatever that means) and as you're so young, you'll simply have to take my word for it when I say that if it's been backed by THIS Government then it's probably utter s*it and someone within this Government has been bribed to say otherwise.

PHOTO DRIVING LICENCE OR PASSPORT PLEASE, or MOD 90 as it's Christmas.

[Gepard]

For bonus points, what law is being broken when someone who is under 18, but uses a PASS card that says they are over 18, gets into a venue and buys alcohol? THE LICENSING ACT. More importantly, who is held responsible? Not the child, not their brain-dead excuses for parents, not the minimum-wage muppet issuing the cards... the door staff.

Not true

Licensing Act 2003

(4) Where a person is charged with an offence under this section by reason of his own conduct it is a defence that—

(a) he believed that the individual was aged 18 or over, and

(b) either—

(i) he had taken all reasonable steps to establish the individual’s age, or

(ii) nobody could reasonably have suspected from the individual’s appearance that he was aged under 18.

It would be near impossible to argue that with the presentation of an ID card that is supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Trading Standards Institute as a method of age verification reasonable steps haven't been taken.

[bigboyblue]

I have emailed the pass card people several times for a 'security poster' pdf or something with the features on it.

They dont have one. The answer is ' there are several different cards, each issued by the organisation (validate, young scott, portman etc). You need to contact them if you wanted the features '.

So, unlike the driving licence, which DVLA freely give out the security 'what to look for' sheet - the cards are a lot more difficult to tell if its fully genuine.

I have a feeling that the hologram is the ONLY security feature on the cards ..........

They do send out a sample card, but you need really to give one out to each member of door staff - so thats 200 gone in my local town then.

[Kieran]

For bonus points, what law is being broken when someone who is under 18, but uses a PASS card that says they are over 18, gets into a venue and buys alcohol? THE LICENSING ACT. More importantly, who is held responsible? Not the child, not their brain-dead excuses for parents, not the minimum-wage muppet issuing the cards... the door staff.

Not true

Licensing Act 2003

(4) Where a person is charged with an offence under this section by reason of his own conduct it is a defence that—

(a) he believed that the individual was aged 18 or over, and

(b) either—

(i) he had taken all reasonable steps to establish the individual’s age, or

(ii) nobody could reasonably have suspected from the individual’s appearance that he was aged under 18.

It would be near impossible to argue that with the presentation of an ID card that is supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Trading Standards Institute as a method of age verification reasonable steps haven't been taken.

Um, Gep, the purchase of alcohol by a minor on licensed premises is indeed an offence under the Licensing Act, and that's the offence I was referring to. Perhaps the way I structrued the paragraph caused some confusion. No bonus points for you buddy ;o)

Presuming you were disagreeing with my assertion that the DS are held responsible, it is here that your opinion and mine take divergent paths. I would argue that accepting such an ID card ( even where it is supported by ACPO and Trading Standards as you point out ) that is well-known throughout the industry as being so deeply flawed would clearly demonstrate ALL [note that the legislation states "ALL reasonable steps"] reasonable steps had NOT been taken. If the defendant tried to argue that he accepted PASS cards because he knew nothing of the abovementioned flaws surrounding PASS cards, I would point out that his failure to be aware of issues surrounding a well-known type of ID card that he would reasonably be likely to encounter in his work amounted to de facto evidence that he was failing to take all reasonable steps to establish the age of ANY individual presenting a PASS card, irrefutably including this one. But that's just the wannabe Prosecutor in me itching to take it on.

On a business/moral level as opposed to a legal one, we all KNOW who gets bitten in the ass when the local authorities or Police uncover underage drinkers in venues - they may sanction the venue, but the venue owner will drop the door team.

[Gepard]

Ah got ya.

Hmmm.....still disagree with the ID card but I've already made my points.

[karlbee]

For bonus points, what law is being broken when someone who is under 18, but uses a PASS card that says they are over 18, gets into a venue and buys alcohol? THE LICENSING ACT. More importantly, who is held responsible? Not the child, not their brain-dead excuses for parents, not the minimum-wage muppet issuing the cards... the door staff.

Not true

Licensing Act 2003

(4) Where a person is charged with an offence under this section by reason of his own conduct it is a defence that—

(a) he believed that the individual was aged 18 or over, and

(b) either—

(i) he had taken all reasonable steps to establish the individual’s age, or

(ii) nobody could reasonably have suspected from the individual’s appearance that he was aged under 18.

It would be near impossible to argue that with the presentation of an ID card that is supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Trading Standards Institute as a method of age verification reasonable steps haven't been taken.

Um, Gep, the purchase of alcohol by a minor on licensed premises is indeed an offence under the Licensing Act, and that's the offence I was referring to. Perhaps the way I structrued the paragraph caused some confusion. No bonus points for you buddy ;o)

Presuming you were disagreeing with my assertion that the DS are held responsible, it is here that your opinion and mine take divergent paths. I would argue that accepting such an ID card ( even where it is supported by ACPO and Trading Standards as you point out ) that is well-known throughout the industry as being so deeply flawed would clearly demonstrate ALL [note that the legislation states "ALL reasonable steps"] reasonable steps had NOT been taken. If the defendant tried to argue that he accepted PASS cards because he knew nothing of the abovementioned flaws surrounding PASS cards, I would point out that his failure to be aware of issues surrounding a well-known type of ID card that he would reasonably be likely to encounter in his work amounted to de facto evidence that he was failing to take all reasonable steps to establish the age of ANY individual presenting a PASS card, irrefutably including this one. But that's just the wannabe Prosecutor in me itching to take it on.

On a business/moral level as opposed to a legal one, we all KNOW who gets bitten in the ass when the local authorities or Police uncover underage drinkers in venues - they may sanction the venue, but the venue owner will drop the door team.

doorstaff dont sell or authorise the sale of alcohol in a venue,only control admission.Its the designated premis supervisor who is ultimatly responsible for the selling of alcohol.The offence is in the selling to under age,not under 18s been in a licenced premis.Just out of interest what do people think legaly the minimum age is to be in a licenced premises?