Even before Covid the legal requirement for an operator was immense.
Our licenses require us by law to be responsible for the behavior of everyone on our premises at all times if we are on site or not.
But Covid and the Government response has thrown up a whole new set of legal responsibilities overnight which change sometimes daily.
With the implementation of new rules, sometimes with no notice, there is no time for the local enforcement authorities to even decide their local interpretation.
So whilst operators are trying their best to interpret the dribbles of information that they receive and the different interpretations from different bodies from Central Government, to Local Government to our varied trade bodies the enforcement authorities are doing the same thing and coming up with different ideas.
The mess that is ensuing is the operator, whilst working exceptionally hard to keep everyone safe (and incidentally trying to save their business and communities in all this) being called up for breaches of the ‘rules’ whilst neighbouring operators ‘get away’ with other seemingly more significant breaches.
I feel too grown up to say it but ‘it is just not fair’