Your frontage is four metres wide and the pavement outside is nearly five. In April you put three tables out and served eighteen extra covers on the Saturday, which is about £600 of trade you would not otherwise have taken. In May somebody from the council came and asked to see your licence.
You did not have one. The route to getting one is straightforward and it takes about a month, which is a month of good weather you have already given away.
The pavement is not yours and never was
Tables and chairs on a public footway sit on highway land, and placing anything on the highway without authority is an obstruction. The route to authority in England is a pavement licence.
The regime came in under the Business and Planning Act 2020 as a temporary measure and was made permanent by the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, taking effect from the end of March 2024. It applies to businesses selling food or drink, for the placing of removable furniture on relevant highway adjacent to the premises.
The application goes to the local authority, which for these purposes is generally also the highway authority. You must display a notice at the premises so the public can see the application, and the authority consults. The statutory framework now provides for a consultation period of 14 days and then a period of 14 days for the authority to determine, so a month from submission to answer is a reasonable expectation. A licence can be granted for up to two years.
Fees are capped. The cap is £500 for a new application and £350 for a renewal, and many authorities charge less. Against the revenue from six tables in a decent summer, that is not the constraint.
Scotland works differently, with permission for occupation of the road obtained from the roads authority under the Roads (Scotland) Act 1984, and Northern Ireland has its own arrangements. In England there is also an older route under section 115E of the Highways Act 1980 for situations the 2020 Act regime does not cover.
The conditions are where the plan meets the pavement
Every pavement licence carries the national conditions set by the Act, plus whatever the authority adds locally.
Two national conditions matter most. The no-obstruction condition requires that the furniture does not prevent pedestrians, and particularly disabled people, from passing along the highway. In practice authorities apply a minimum clear width, informed by Department for Transport guidance on inclusive mobility, which points to a minimum unobstructed width of 1.5 metres and a preference for 2 metres. Measure your pavement from the building line to the kerb, subtract the clear route, subtract anything already on the footway such as a lamp column, a cycle stand, a tree pit or a bin, and what is left is what you can furnish. It is usually less than you assumed.
The other is the smoke-free seating condition. The Act requires licence holders to make reasonable provision for seating where smoking is not permitted, which means you cannot let the whole outside area become the smoking area by default. Some authorities go further and condition the area as entirely smoke-free.
Local conditions typically cover hours, which is the one that hurts. A licence conditioned to clear the tables away by nine in the evening removes the second sitting on a summer Friday, which is precisely the trade you wanted. Barriers, planters or rope lines are often required to define the area for people with visual impairments. The furniture must be removable, which means at close of business it comes in, and somebody has to be rostered to do that.
Insurance is a standing requirement. Public liability cover extending to the licensed area, usually with a minimum sum insured, and evidence of it submitted with the application.
A pavement licence is not planning and it is not an alcohol licence
This is the most common and most expensive misunderstanding.
The licence authorises the furniture on the highway. It does not grant planning permission for anything, so a permanent structure, a fixed canopy, a decked terrace or a retractable awning fixed to the building may need a separate application, and almost certainly does in a conservation area or on a listed building.
Nor does it deal with alcohol. Your premises licence under the Licensing Act 2003 has a plan attached to it showing the licensed area. If the pavement is not on that plan, serving alcohol to people sitting there is either an off-sale, if your licence permits off-sales, or it is not authorised at all. The distinction is not academic: off-sales and on-sales carry different conditions, and some licences carry a condition requiring alcohol to be consumed within the building.
The clean answer is to check your licence plan before you apply for the pavement licence, and to apply to vary it at the same time if it does not cover the area. A variation takes its own consultation period and the two clocks can run together if you start them together.
Also read your lease. A ground floor unit with residential flats above frequently has a lease clause about causing nuisance to other occupiers, and outdoor drinking at half past ten is the most reliable generator of complaints in hospitality. Public nuisance is one of the four licensing objectives, and a review of your premises licence is a much bigger problem than a refused pavement application.
The covers only exist for part of the year
The commercial mistake is to build a business plan on the outside covers. In this country they work properly for perhaps four months and unpredictably for another three.
Which means the capital you put into the outside area has to earn back within the season, twice, before you can call it a good decision. Good chairs that stack, that can be carried by one person, that survive rain because they will get rained on, and that do not need to be replaced in year two. Umbrellas with weighted bases, because a parasol in a gust is a serious injury and a claim on the policy you had to buy anyway.
Patio heaters are the question everybody asks. They extend the season at the margins, they consume gas or electricity at a rate that is easy to underestimate, and an increasing number of local authorities have views about them. Run the numbers on additional covers against the running cost before you buy six.
The realistic way to value the space is as a demand shifter rather than a capacity increase. Outside tables make you visible, they make a quiet room look busy from the street, and they catch the passing trade that decides where to eat in the ten seconds it takes to walk past. That is worth more than the eighteen covers.
Where this shows up in the game
Restaurants are part of Business Baron's full game, and cafés and pubs can be run in the free game at no cost. The seasons are real, so anything that only earns in good weather earns in some months and not others. Consents come from bodies with their own timetables, and the council is one of them.