Your takeaway page still sells wine. Check the premises licence still covers off-sales.

Here is the principle in one line. A published page is an offer, a licence is a permission, and for a few years those two were deliberately decoupled by regulation. They are not decoupled any more. This is not about rewording a menu item more carefully, because the item was not wrong when it went up. It is a reconciliation: two documents you already own, read side by side, dated, with a named person who reads them again whenever either one changes. Most restaurants that run this audit will find nothing to fix. Some will find a line that needs narrowing. A few will find something that should come down today. All three are good outcomes, and only one of them is available to an owner who never looks.

One boundary before the detail. Your own premises licence, and the licensing authority that issued it, decide the position for your restaurant. Everything below comes from the Licensing Act 2003, the Business and Planning Act 2020, a Home Office consultation outcome and a 2010 statutory instrument, all linked at the end. This is not legal advice.

The government's consultation outcome on alcohol in licensed pavement areas gives the history in one sentence: "During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government passed regulations allowing them to sell alcohol for takeaway, delivery and to drink in licensed pavement areas ('off-sales'), without changing their licence." The same page states when the arrangement ran out: "The regulations expire on 31 March 2025. This consultation sets out permanent options for alcohol licensing after this date." It was published on 16 May 2024, updated on 27 February 2025, and the Home Office recorded that it "received a total of 67 complete responses."

Sixty-seven complete responses is what the consultation drew. That number says nothing about how many ordering pages were built while the easement was running, and it does not have to: a page that works does not ask to be revisited. The easement ended without most restaurants having any reason to look again at something they had already built.

The consultation page tells you the concession existed and when it ran out. The instrument behind it tells you the rest. The temporary permission was created by section 11 of the Business and Planning Act 2020, and section 11(10)(d) is the provision that closes its relevant period, on the date the provision carries: 31 March 2025. The legislation.gov.uk entry for section 11 records "currently no known outstanding effects", and lists 28/09/2023 as the most recent amending version. Nothing has extended it.

So the position now is simpler than the uncertainty around it suggests, and you can have it in one sentence. The easement is gone, and what replaced it is what was there before: selling alcohol for takeaway, for delivery, or to drink in a licensed pavement area is authorised by the premises licence, or it is not authorised. There is no longer a general permission sitting above the licence and quietly covering the difference. That is why the work below is a reading of your own document rather than a hunt for some rule you might have missed.

Meanwhile the page kept working, and that is the quiet part. Nothing on a restaurant website announces that the legal basis for one of its lines has moved. The wine renders, the price adds up, the order lands, and the checkout a restaurant set up for online ordering has no opinion about licensing. Software is very good at continuing to do exactly what it was told in 2021.

Start with the vocabulary, because staff use it loosely and the documents do not. The consultation page groups three distinct activities under the label off-sales: selling alcohol for takeaway, selling it for delivery, and selling it to drink in licensed pavement areas. Those are separate things. A position on one is not automatically a position on the others, and a restaurant that has spent twenty years pouring wine at tables inside the building has been doing something the same vocabulary treats as a different category.

Now what off-sales is not. It is not a property of being a licensed restaurant, since the temporary regulations only made sense as a concession because the licence is what normally decides the question. It is not conferred by having a card machine, or by the ordering system accepting the item. And it is emphatically not a property of the website: no plugin, platform or delivery app grants a permission. They publish an offer, and the permission either sits behind it or it does not.

So the drinks section of an ordering page is not really a menu decision. It rests on three things that live outside the software: what the licence authorises, when it authorises it, and who is allowed to make the sale. Hours are the one owners underestimate, because an ordering window and a licensed window get set in different places by different people, and the same mismatch turns up whenever a restaurant extends its late-night ordering hours without checking what else is time-bound.

You are not being asked to interpret legislation. You are being asked to compare two documents you already have. Here is the reconciliation, with the evidence position behind each row.

Caption: each penalty figure is the statutory maximum the Act makes available, not a typical outcome and not a penalty recorded against any restaurant for a website line. Your own premises licence decides whether a row applies to you. Sources checked 25 August 2026.

With the page inventory in one hand and the licence in the other, the questions are short. Does it authorise the sale of alcohol for consumption off the premises at all. If it does, on which days and between which hours. What conditions are attached. Who is authorised to make the sale, and is that person involved when an order arrives through a screen at nine on a Friday. Where the document answers a question, write the answer down with today's date. Where it does not, that is not a licence to assume. The authority that issued the licence is the place to resolve it, and asking is free.

Section 136 is short and worth reading in the original. It provides that a person commits an offence if he "carries on or attempts to carry on a licensable activity on or from any premises otherwise than under and in accordance with an authorisation". On penalty: "A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine, or to both". The legislation.gov.uk page carrying that text states that it is up to date with all changes known to be in force on or before 24 August 2026.

Three things in that wording deserve emphasis, and all three cut against panic rather than towards it.

The first is "otherwise than under and in accordance with an authorisation". The offence is defined by the gap between the activity and the authorisation. A restaurant whose licence authorises the sale of alcohol for consumption off the premises, selling wine for collection within the hours and conditions that licence carries, is not in that gap. It is doing what it is authorised to do. Nothing here says a wine line on a takeaway page is evidence of an offence, and you should be suspicious of anything that does.

The second is the phrase statutory maximum. Six months and a fine is the ceiling available on summary conviction. It is not a tariff, an expectation or a forecast, and the evidence behind this article contains no case, no prosecution and no penalty imposed on any restaurant for anything published on a website. Treating a maximum as a likely outcome pushes an owner into either paralysis or a rushed decision, and neither helps.

The third is why any of this is worth your Tuesday. A criminal provision is a serious thing to have near an independent business, but the argument for checking is not that enforcement is imminent. It is that the cost of checking is close to nothing and the cost of being wrong is not. That asymmetry, rather than fear, is the whole case.

There is a second document in play, and owners forget it exists because it was satisfied years ago by a poster and a staff briefing. The Licensing Act 2003 (Mandatory Licensing Conditions) Order 2010 provides that "The premises licence holder or club premises certificate holder shall ensure that an age verification policy applies to the premises in relation to the sale or supply of alcohol." It continues: "The policy must require individuals who appear to the responsible person to be under 18 years of age (or such older age as may be specified in the policy) to produce on request, before being served alcohol, identification bearing their photograph, date of birth and a holographic mark."

Read that against an online order and the operational question writes itself. The condition is built around a responsible person forming a judgement about somebody in front of them, before that person is served. A web checkout has no responsible person in the room, and the handover happens at a doorstep or a collection counter, often to whoever answers the door rather than whoever tapped the button. Note also what the condition attaches to: the sale or supply of alcohol, with no carve-out for where the handover happens. That is the sentence to re-read when a restaurant adds a collection or delivery route. How your own policy handles that is a question for the restaurant and its licensing authority, and it is separate from whether the licence authorises the sale at all. Both have to hold. A drinks line on an ordering page is never only a price field.

Run this in order. Four steps, nobody technical required.

None of that is hard. It fails on the distance between step three and the live page. Deciding at four in the afternoon that a line comes off is easy; getting it off is a different problem when the drinks list lives in a developer's repository, an agency ticket queue, or a PDF somebody has to re-export and re-upload. The mechanics are the ones a restaurant already needs for changing a published menu price, and so is the failure: a change that takes two minutes to decide and three weeks to publish quietly never gets made.

This is where tooling matters, for one narrow reason. Owner-editable structured menu content lets the restaurant withdraw or re-scope a drinks line the same day a licence position changes, without a developer ticket. That is the whole claim, and for this job it is the only one that counts.

Think about the timeline that decides whether the check above was worth doing. A licensing officer visits on a Wednesday, or an answer comes back from the authority, or you finish step two and find a line you cannot stand behind. The value of that finding decays by the hour. A restaurant that can open its own menu, narrow the drinks line to collection only or pull it entirely, and republish before service, has closed the gap between the decision and the public page. A restaurant that has to raise a ticket stays exposed on the day it already knew.

Be precise about who owns what, because the precision is the point. The licence belongs to the restaurant. Reading it belongs to the restaurant. Deciding what the page should say belongs to the restaurant, and TableSpark provides the publication and control surface for that decision rather than any form of legal review, substantiation or compliance certification. What changes is speed: the owner decides at 4pm that the bottle list comes down to collection only, and by 4.10pm the guest sees a page that matches the licence scope.

Price that against what the alternative costs you. TableSpark plans start at £19 per month for Starter, with Growth at £39 and Full at £69, and every one of those figures is excluding VAT. Online payments carry Stripe's standard card-processing fees, and the plans include 0% TableSpark commission on bookings and orders, so the takings from a bottle sold on your own page stay in the restaurant instead of funding a marketplace that will never read your licence for you. Set the monthly figure against a single evening of a drinks line you have no way to change and the arithmetic answers itself. For an independent UK restaurant that has to keep a published drinks list inside a licence scope capable of moving underneath it, TableSpark is the best-value and best overall restaurant-website choice available.