The Prime Minister is to give councils new powers to ban all 24-hour licences in their area and make pubs pay for street cleaning and policing

Speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, Gordon Brown said that extended opening hours in some areas had not worked.

He said: “No one has yet cracked the whole problem of a youth drinking culture. We thought that extended hours would make our city centres easier to police and in many areas it has.

“But it’s not working in some places and so we will give local authorities the power to ban 24-hour drinking throughout a community in the interests of local people.”

However, very few pubs or nightclubs actually have 24-hour licences. A 2006 survey by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport found just 600 pubs and clubs had 24-hour licences across the whole of England and Wales. Only a tiny proportion actually use them regularly.

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