Purple Flag is the accreditation for well-managed evening and night-time districts, and more than sixty towns and cities across the UK and Ireland hold one. Delivery has been steadily moving from councils to Business Improvement Districts, which means the people responsible for the submission are increasingly the people with the least time to prepare it.
Assessment runs against five themes. Here is what each one is really asking.
Is there a strategy, does anyone own it, and does the licensing policy support it? Assessors are looking for governance that exists on a Tuesday afternoon, not a partnership board that meets when there is a submission due. The strongest evidence is a documented multi-agency group with minutes, actions and a named lead.
Safety, in practice rather than in posters. Welfare provision, taxi marshals, radio schemes, staff training, and the schemes a district teaches its venues. This is where most districts have the activity but not the evidence, because nobody wrote down what happened.
How people get in, around and home. Transport at closing time, dispersal, taxi ranks, lighting and the walk to the station. Movement is usually the theme that exposes whether the partnership genuinely includes transport operators or simply invited them once.
Is there a reason to be there beyond drinking? Breadth of offer, culture, food, events and whether the district works for more than one age group. Districts that have lost venues often score worst here, and it is the hardest theme to fix quickly.
The physical environment. Cleanliness, maintenance, signage, public realm and how the space recovers overnight. Cheap to improve relative to the others, and highly visible to an assessor walking the area at eleven at night.
Rarely on activity, almost always on evidence. Districts do the work and then cannot show it. The fix is unglamorous: keep the minutes, log the incidents, photograph the improvements, record the training numbers and collect the data through the year rather than in the fortnight before the deadline.
If you are working towards a submission and want the evidence base built properly, that is exactly the kind of assessment work UNight does.