Background: In Great Britain, local authorities responsible for alcohol premises licensing produce a statement of licensing policy setting out how they intend to exercise their statutory licensing functions including on trading hours. We aimed to describe and compare these policies on alcohol trading hours, including their interpretation and application of laws and guidance.

Methods: Policies were obtained from the websites of all 366 local licensing authorities and uploaded to NVivo. Using content analysis, relevant text was located through manual searching and coded inductively.

Results: Many local authorities do not explicitly seek to place controls on trading hours, while others create complex circumstances under which extended hours may be granted. Setting out core or matrix hours is the best example in the findings of local authorities applying their limited discretion to implement the law in ways that suit their needs.

Conclusion: Although licensing is ostensibly a policy system devolved to local areas, power remains at the centre in national legislation and guidance. Resultantly, local discretion is highly constrained especially in England/Wales. There is a need to attend to the details of statutory instruments to understand how headline principles and objectives can be made workable in practice for local authorities and boards.