How much does it cost to run a sex shop? More than you’d think. According to council papers published this week, a new sex establishment licence in Wandsworth costs £14,050. That’s £8,430 just to process the application, plus £5,620 for “managing and enforcing the licensing scheme.”
But the fee is somewhat besides the point because according to the council nobody has ever applied. It adopted the legislation in 1983 and has maintained, reviewed, and updated this fee every year since. Forty-three years of meticulous preparation for a day that has never come. As the council’s own report puts it, with admirable restraint: “This Authority has not issued any sex establishment licences.”
Should anyone ever test the market, renewal will cost them thousands more each year. The fee is unchanged from last year. There was, presumably, no market pressure to adjust it.
These figures come from Paper 26-56, the council’s annual review of Wandsworth licence fees, which goes before the Regulatory Licensing Committee on 16 February. The full fee schedule runs to eleven pages. Most of it covers routine business: dog day care, pet shops, scrap metal dealers. But buried in the appendix are fees for activities that either barely exist in the borough or have never happened at all.
How much does it cost to keep a lion in Wandsworth? How much is a zoo licence? Take our quiz to find out.
If you have a lion in your back garden, we have bad news
The cost of keeping a dangerous wild animal in Wandsworth has gone up by £65 this year. If you were putting it off because of the price, the news is not encouraging.
The council’s report notes there have been “not been any applications under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act for many years, if at all.” That cautious “if at all” deserves a moment. Officers aren’t entirely sure anyone has ever wanted to keep a dangerous wild animal in the borough. But the fee has been calculated, split neatly between application and compliance charges, and increased for the new financial year. Just in case.
A zoo costs a fraction of a sex shop
One of the more startling comparisons in the document: a zoo licence in Wandsworth costs a fraction of a sex shop licence. The borough has exactly one zoo, Battersea Park Children’s Zoo, which also needs a DEFRA-nominated inspector to visit. It has zero sex shops.
Wandsworth’s full animal licensing picture is remarkably modest: six dog day care centres, twelve home boarders, three pet shops, one dog breeder, and one zoo. That is it. Over 300,000 people, one zoo, and a licence regime that caters for lions, tigers, and venomous snakes that nobody owns.
You need a licence to hypnotise someone on stage
The Hypnotism Act 1952 is still very much in force. If you want to perform stage hypnotism in Wandsworth, you need a licence from the council. The fee covers not just the application but the cost of an officer attending the performance to ensure conditions are met. One imagines them in the audience, clipboard in hand, resisting the urge to volunteer when the hypnotist asks for a willing participant.
Why these fees exist at all
The fees exist because the law says they must. A 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Hemmings v Westminster City Council confirmed that councils can set licence fees to recover the full cost of running the licensing system, including investigating anyone operating without one.
This creates a pleasing circularity. The council must be ready to process applications that never arrive. Being ready costs money. The money must be recovered from the applicants who don’t exist. Paper 26-56 acknowledges the problem: because no sex establishment applications have been received, “it is difficult to accurately calculate the cost of the procedures and formalities under the legislation.”
So the council estimates what it would cost to do something nobody has ever asked it to do, adjusts for inflation, presents it to committee, and moves on. The total additional revenue generated by all the proposed fee increases across every licence category is, well, modest. You can guess how modest in our quiz.
The Licensing Committee meets on 16 February. The papers are not expected to provoke significant debate.
There was a Sex shop on West Hill back the 90’s so claiming that there has never been one in the borough is not true.
It is more likely that they never actually applied for the license , hence the claim.