A young woman of legal drinking age picks up a bottle of wine in her local corner shop, takes it to the counter and pays the cashier. The cashier bags the bottle, hands it over and the woman leaves the store. Nothing wrong with that you may think.
Yet, the store has just failed a test-purchase check. The reason? Challenge 21. And although this time it got away with a rap over the knuckles for failing to check the identify of someone who looked under 21 (the test purchaser sent in by Trading Standards was 19, so legally entitled to buy alcohol, after all), it could soon face much more punitive measures if it is caught out again.
This year, pressure on retailers like the one above has intensified as first Scotland considered introducing a voluntary ban on the sale of alcohol to under-21s and then the new London mayor, Boris Johnson, got in on the act, backing the London Borough of Croydon’s plans to introduce a similar ban. Last month, more councils came out in support, signalling a capital-wide ban could be on the cards.
But why go so far as to introduce a ban, albeit a voluntary one, when most retailers have adopted Challenge 21 or variations thereof – unless Challenge 21 is not as successful as it purports to be?
Advocates of a ban believe it will radically reduce binge drinking and antisocial behaviour among young people in trouble hotspots across London. However, opponents warn that banning people from buying alcohol who are legally allowed to is an erosion of civil liberties. The bans may be voluntary, but they could be the thin end of the wedge, heralding more draconian measures such as an increase in the minimum age to 21. There’s no need to resort to such measures, they add, when most alcohol retailers operate Challenge 21-style schemes.
Since Challenge 21 was introduced in 2005 in an attempt to stamp out underage alcohol purchases, it has spawned a host of variations on the theme including Challenge 25 and Challenge 30. The schemes, which are recommended by industry bodies, the police and Trading Standards, place the onus of responsibility firmly on the seller rather than buyer. Retailers that fail test purchases face at least a caution, possibly a fine or even the loss of their licence to sell alcohol altogether, the severity increasing if the test purchasers are underage.
Three Tesco stores were caught out by the scheme last year, temporarily losing their licences – Crawley and Worthing for one month each and a Maidstone store for three months. In each case, they had sold to underage test purchasers sent in by Trading Standards. Yet, Tesco remains loyal to the scheme and believes that the 21 age limit is sufficiently high to catch most underage would-be purchasers.
“This is a constant challenge for our business and the industry and we have to keep working on solutions,” says Tesco licensing manager Greg Bartley. “Abiding by the law means keeping an eye on the situation at all times and always striving to improve. We chose Challenge 21 to support and help our staff on the front line. It gives a bit of leeway and margin for error.”
Other retailers believe in the concept but disagree with the 21 age limit. This June, Morrisons announced plans to switch from Challenge 21 to Task 25 (its name for Challenge 25) and now operates the scheme in known troublespots.
Independent chain the Mills Group, meanwhile, has introduced Challenge 30 after having been twice caught out under Challenge 21. “This is about eliminating any doubt for our staff,” says Mills Group MD Nigel Mills. “Despite our best efforts with Challenge 21, we still got caught by Trading Standards, so this is our way of protecting ourselves.”
For others, the issue is not so much over age as ensuring the checks are actually conducted. “We were handed an on-the-spot fine for selling alcohol to a mole from Trading Standards,” says Bipim Patel, owner of Crispins Food & Wine in Notting Hill. “She actually looked old enough to legally purchase booze but our mistake was not asking to check her ID,” he says. “We always ask for ID if the person doesn’t look old enough.”
Shoppers don’t always react well, he admits. “At times it’s at our own risk – some can take offence and get quite aggressive.”
Customer aggression is an issue Jonathan James, MD of James Graven & Sons, is also all too familiar with. His five stores in Cambridge have to contend with “aggravation from customers who don’t like having to prove their ages on a daily basis,” he says.
However, he, too, supports the scheme. When relief staff in one of his stores were caught selling alcohol to minors, he asked Trading Standards to come in and provide training, which they did. “We do use Challenge 21 and I think it works as there aren’t many of us that would be able to face a line-up of youngsters and correctly identify who is and who isn’t over the age of 18. Challenge 21 means you don’t have to.”
Others are less convinced. “Any system that relies on personal judgement will ultimately fail,” says Dr Brad Krevor, an American academic who specialises in initiatives to tackle binge drinking and underage sales. “Working on a checkout is repetitive work and as routine sets in, staff often cease focusing on each individual transaction and end up being on a sort of auto-pilot. It’s a case of ill-attention rather than a wilful disregard of the law.”
He believes the only systems that work are those that make checks standard and mandatory, so that whoever approaches the counter with a bottle of alcohol or, indeed, a box of tobacco, is asked for ID regardless of their age. Such systems are already used to good effect in the US, he says, and as long as the UK industry continues to endorse ad hoc checks, retailers will continue to be caught out.
UK retailers, however, argue that mandatory checks are a step too far. “Checking every single person for ID in this culture is simply a recipe for complaints and aggressive behaviour,” says one. “It should be about point-of-sales staff using their common sense.”
The key to making Challenge 21 work is training, says Tesco. Its staff get training at least three times a year, with further sessions if they are deemed necessary.
For smaller retailers without this sort of resources, some of the big alcohol manufacturers can offer assistance. Diageo, for instance, has developed a training DVD for checkout assistants that it hopes will be rolled out across the UK following a pilot scheme this summer.
Brewer SABMiller, which already provides DVDs and other material to help out smaller stores in the US, is also looking at what it might export ideas-wise to the UK. “When you look at what is going on now in the UK around this issue, it’s a bit like déjà vu,” says Kristin Wolfe, SABMiller’s head of alcohol policy. “There’s a lot we can extract from initiatives in the US, such as guides to recognising different types of ID, best-practice guidelines and advice on dealing with customers who don’t like being asked for ID.”
Wolfe believes that of all the lessons learnt by the US, the most important is ensuring that retailers do not feel that they are being unfairly blamed and making sure front-line sales staff are made to feel they are part of the solution, rather than the problem.
This can be achieved by implementing industry-wide initiatives that include retailers, police, Trading Standards and local government. “Only a co-operative system is a sustainable one,” Wolfe says.
This has not gone unnoticed in the UK where the WSTA has already piloted an initiative in Cambridgeshire bringing the different strands of local communities together to tackle underage drinking through education, enforcement and public perception. The pilot scheme produced a 42% fall in antisocial behaviour, a 94% fall in underage people found in possession of alcohol and a 92% fall in alcohol-related litter.
“The absolute key to achieving such results was getting all the players, sectors that had previously seen each other as the enemy, to work together,” says the WSTA’s policy advisor Stephen Hogg. “The sea change was getting stakeholders to work at rewarding good practice rather than punishing bad. So, for example, we got Trading Standards and the police to agree to give feedback to retailers, good and bad.
“Previously retailers had not heard back when they had done well – only when they had failed, which just seems ludicrous. We also managed to get some of the larger retailers to fund places on staff training schemes for the smaller independent stores, which was a huge boost.”
So successful has the scheme been that plans are afoot to take it to Reading, Kent and North Yorkshire in the next few months.
Of course, with retailers coming under ever-more scrutiny over their alcohol-selling practices, staff can occasionally go too far. In May, Tesco was ridiculed when staff followed its policy of not selling alcohol to adults accompanied by children over zealously. One cashier refused to sell a crate of lager to a 39-year-old because she was accompanied by her 18-year-old stepson who could not produce any ID.
Proxy buying is a major issue that retailers have yet to address, concedes Dr Krevor. “In the US only 15% to 30% of underage drinkers purchase the alcohol themselves,” he says. “That is the next and even harder challenge facing us all – how to stop adults buying for underage drinkers? No one has successfully answered that question yet, but we are all working on it.”
But for now, retailers are focusing on Challenge 21. Most believe the scheme can and does work if staff are trained and IDs routinely checked. It had better. With a ban on under-21s buying alcohol already touted and a change to the legal age limit for alcohol purchases also possibly on the cards, the scrutiny is only going to get more intense. n
Yet, the store has just failed a test-purchase check. The reason? Challenge 21. And although this time it got away with a rap over the knuckles for failing to check the identify of someone who looked under 21 (the test purchaser sent in by Trading Standards was 19, so legally entitled to buy alcohol, after all), it could soon face much more punitive measures if it is caught out again.
This year, pressure on retailers like the one above has intensified as first Scotland considered introducing a voluntary ban on the sale of alcohol to under-21s and then the new London mayor, Boris Johnson, got in on the act, backing the London Borough of Croydon’s plans to introduce a similar ban. Last month, more councils came out in support, signalling a capital-wide ban could be on the cards.
But why go so far as to introduce a ban, albeit a voluntary one, when most retailers have adopted Challenge 21 or variations thereof – unless Challenge 21 is not as successful as it purports to be?
Advocates of a ban believe it will radically reduce binge drinking and antisocial behaviour among young people in trouble hotspots across London. However, opponents warn that banning people from buying alcohol who are legally allowed to is an erosion of civil liberties. The bans may be voluntary, but they could be the thin end of the wedge, heralding more draconian measures such as an increase in the minimum age to 21. There’s no need to resort to such measures, they add, when most alcohol retailers operate Challenge 21-style schemes.
Since Challenge 21 was introduced in 2005 in an attempt to stamp out underage alcohol purchases, it has spawned a host of variations on the theme including Challenge 25 and Challenge 30. The schemes, which are recommended by industry bodies, the police and Trading Standards, place the onus of responsibility firmly on the seller rather than buyer. Retailers that fail test purchases face at least a caution, possibly a fine or even the loss of their licence to sell alcohol altogether, the severity increasing if the test purchasers are underage.
Three Tesco stores were caught out by the scheme last year, temporarily losing their licences – Crawley and Worthing for one month each and a Maidstone store for three months. In each case, they had sold to underage test purchasers sent in by Trading Standards. Yet, Tesco remains loyal to the scheme and believes that the 21 age limit is sufficiently high to catch most underage would-be purchasers.
“This is a constant challenge for our business and the industry and we have to keep working on solutions,” says Tesco licensing manager Greg Bartley. “Abiding by the law means keeping an eye on the situation at all times and always striving to improve. We chose Challenge 21 to support and help our staff on the front line. It gives a bit of leeway and margin for error.”
Other retailers believe in the concept but disagree with the 21 age limit. This June, Morrisons announced plans to switch from Challenge 21 to Task 25 (its name for Challenge 25) and now operates the scheme in known troublespots.
Independent chain the Mills Group, meanwhile, has introduced Challenge 30 after having been twice caught out under Challenge 21. “This is about eliminating any doubt for our staff,” says Mills Group MD Nigel Mills. “Despite our best efforts with Challenge 21, we still got caught by Trading Standards, so this is our way of protecting ourselves.”
For others, the issue is not so much over age as ensuring the checks are actually conducted. “We were handed an on-the-spot fine for selling alcohol to a mole from Trading Standards,” says Bipim Patel, owner of Crispins Food & Wine in Notting Hill. “She actually looked old enough to legally purchase booze but our mistake was not asking to check her ID,” he says. “We always ask for ID if the person doesn’t look old enough.”
Shoppers don’t always react well, he admits. “At times it’s at our own risk – some can take offence and get quite aggressive.”
Customer aggression is an issue Jonathan James, MD of James Graven & Sons, is also all too familiar with. His five stores in Cambridge have to contend with “aggravation from customers who don’t like having to prove their ages on a daily basis,” he says.
However, he, too, supports the scheme. When relief staff in one of his stores were caught selling alcohol to minors, he asked Trading Standards to come in and provide training, which they did. “We do use Challenge 21 and I think it works as there aren’t many of us that would be able to face a line-up of youngsters and correctly identify who is and who isn’t over the age of 18. Challenge 21 means you don’t have to.”
Others are less convinced. “Any system that relies on personal judgement will ultimately fail,” says Dr Brad Krevor, an American academic who specialises in initiatives to tackle binge drinking and underage sales. “Working on a checkout is repetitive work and as routine sets in, staff often cease focusing on each individual transaction and end up being on a sort of auto-pilot. It’s a case of ill-attention rather than a wilful disregard of the law.”
He believes the only systems that work are those that make checks standard and mandatory, so that whoever approaches the counter with a bottle of alcohol or, indeed, a box of tobacco, is asked for ID regardless of their age. Such systems are already used to good effect in the US, he says, and as long as the UK industry continues to endorse ad hoc checks, retailers will continue to be caught out.
UK retailers, however, argue that mandatory checks are a step too far. “Checking every single person for ID in this culture is simply a recipe for complaints and aggressive behaviour,” says one. “It should be about point-of-sales staff using their common sense.”
The key to making Challenge 21 work is training, says Tesco. Its staff get training at least three times a year, with further sessions if they are deemed necessary.
For smaller retailers without this sort of resources, some of the big alcohol manufacturers can offer assistance. Diageo, for instance, has developed a training DVD for checkout assistants that it hopes will be rolled out across the UK following a pilot scheme this summer.
Brewer SABMiller, which already provides DVDs and other material to help out smaller stores in the US, is also looking at what it might export ideas-wise to the UK. “When you look at what is going on now in the UK around this issue, it’s a bit like déjà vu,” says Kristin Wolfe, SABMiller’s head of alcohol policy. “There’s a lot we can extract from initiatives in the US, such as guides to recognising different types of ID, best-practice guidelines and advice on dealing with customers who don’t like being asked for ID.”
Wolfe believes that of all the lessons learnt by the US, the most important is ensuring that retailers do not feel that they are being unfairly blamed and making sure front-line sales staff are made to feel they are part of the solution, rather than the problem.
This can be achieved by implementing industry-wide initiatives that include retailers, police, Trading Standards and local government. “Only a co-operative system is a sustainable one,” Wolfe says.
This has not gone unnoticed in the UK where the WSTA has already piloted an initiative in Cambridgeshire bringing the different strands of local communities together to tackle underage drinking through education, enforcement and public perception. The pilot scheme produced a 42% fall in antisocial behaviour, a 94% fall in underage people found in possession of alcohol and a 92% fall in alcohol-related litter.
“The absolute key to achieving such results was getting all the players, sectors that had previously seen each other as the enemy, to work together,” says the WSTA’s policy advisor Stephen Hogg. “The sea change was getting stakeholders to work at rewarding good practice rather than punishing bad. So, for example, we got Trading Standards and the police to agree to give feedback to retailers, good and bad.
“Previously retailers had not heard back when they had done well – only when they had failed, which just seems ludicrous. We also managed to get some of the larger retailers to fund places on staff training schemes for the smaller independent stores, which was a huge boost.”
So successful has the scheme been that plans are afoot to take it to Reading, Kent and North Yorkshire in the next few months.
Of course, with retailers coming under ever-more scrutiny over their alcohol-selling practices, staff can occasionally go too far. In May, Tesco was ridiculed when staff followed its policy of not selling alcohol to adults accompanied by children over zealously. One cashier refused to sell a crate of lager to a 39-year-old because she was accompanied by her 18-year-old stepson who could not produce any ID.
Proxy buying is a major issue that retailers have yet to address, concedes Dr Krevor. “In the US only 15% to 30% of underage drinkers purchase the alcohol themselves,” he says. “That is the next and even harder challenge facing us all – how to stop adults buying for underage drinkers? No one has successfully answered that question yet, but we are all working on it.”
But for now, retailers are focusing on Challenge 21. Most believe the scheme can and does work if staff are trained and IDs routinely checked. It had better. With a ban on under-21s buying alcohol already touted and a change to the legal age limit for alcohol purchases also possibly on the cards, the scrutiny is only going to get more intense. n
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