Liquor incident registers

Maintaining an incident register will give you a better understanding of events that affect the safety of your venue and patrons.

It will also help you to develop appropriate strategies to reduce the risk of alcohol-related violence and anti-social behaviour at your venue.

We encourage all licensees to maintain an incident register even if it is not a requirement for your venue. They are a useful compliance tool, and can form part of your venue's responsible practice.

You should procedures in place to ensure your incident register is carefully maintained. You may delegate this responsibility to managers or other key staff at your venue. However, it is the legal obligation of the licensee and approved manager to ensure the incident register is appropriately maintained.

The types of incidents you must record in your register are outlined in Section 56 of the Liquor Act 2007 and Section 42 in the Liquor Regulation 2018

Incidents that must be recorded are incidents that involve:

• violence or anti-social behaviour at your venue
• violence or anti-social behaviour occurring in the immediate vicinity of your  venue and involve a person who has recently left or been refused entry to your premises
• someone being asked to leave under section 77 of the Liquor Act
• a patron needing medical assistance
• the possession or use of suspected prohibited drugs/plants on the premises.

Venues should also report other things that help you gain a more complete understanding of events that affect the safety of your venue and patrons, and incidents that affect your venue's operations:

• entry refusals: including minors, suspected intoxication, insufficient identification
• requests for self exclusion
• compliance issues: including missing RSA competency cards, faulty gaming machines and disturbance complaints
• WHS issues
• Public liability cases.

Your incident register should also record the details of all incidents that occur outside of the standard trading period for your licence type.

You are required to record the details of all incidents regardless of the time of day at which they occur if your venue is:

• located in the Kings Cross or Sydney CBD Entertainment precincts – with the exception of packaged liquor licences or on-premises licences without a PSA, and is not a theatre or cinema
• listed as a declared premises under Schedule 4 of the Act.

You must also record the details of any action you take in response to an incident. An incident register can be in paper or digital form.

If information is required to be recorded in an incident register under subsection (2) or (3) about an incident, the licensee must ensure the information is recorded as soon as practicable, but no later than 24 hours, after the incident occurs.

As licensee or approved manager, educate your staff about the value of maintaining an incident register so they understand its importance in supporting a safe and responsible venue.

Regularly reviewing how you record incidents with staff, as soon as possible after each incident, will help you to be consistent and accurate.

Mandatory venues

Venues in the Kings Cross or Sydney CBD Entertainment precincts, must maintain an incident register in a format approved by us.

Venues are permitted to maintain an incident register in either bound book or digital format. If you choose to use a digital form of incident register then you may stop entering incidents in the paper book register.

Through consultation with industry, we designed a user-friendly format with two parts:

1. the incident log book
2. the incident report book.

Registers are A4 size and wire bound for durability. Flexible plastic covers protect against spillages or damp surfaces.

We recommend using the approved incident register book available from us or a digital incident register matching the requirements of the physical incident register, rather than creating a format of your own that may not be compliant.

The use of digital incident registers is encouraged for licensed venues across NSW and has been approved, provided:

• the content requirements match the physical incident register
• it records the time and date of any entry of data to the digital register.

Voluntary venues

If your venue is not in a precinct, you can use any of the following:

• The incident register available from us
• Any bound book with pre-numbered pages and the same incident report content areas as the our incident register
• An digital register provided it contains the same content as our incident register and records the time and date of any entry of data to the digital register.

The digital incident register (DIR) register must include pre-designated fields for recording information on the above reportable incident types. Venues may choose to record details of other, less serious incidents for best practice.

Any DIR must display the following information on its screen directly before or after user login:

“The law requires all licensed venues in the Kings Cross and CBD precincts to keep an incident register at all times.”

The DIR must include mandatory, voluntary and/or pre-filled fields with standardised text. The required fields include - but are not limited to:

• date and time
• location
• incident type
• capacity for recording additional details when reporting on mandatory incident types1
• incident details, actions taken/summary outcomes
• witness details and
• persons of interest details.

All required incidents must be entered in the DIRas soon as possible after the event and within one hour.

A more detailed account must be completed as soon as possible, and within six hours. This should outline any reportable incident that involves violence, anti-social behaviour, when patrons are asked to leave, or when an injury occurs that requires medical assistance.

Required software security and data integrity features

Software for an DIR must provide the following features:

• ability to restrict access to approved staff members or users - via username/password or other means
• a system for managing an approved user list  - creating and deleting approved users
• ability to support multiple approved users
• automatic system log out after a set period of inactivity
• automatic assignment of an unalterable, sequenced unique identifier for each incident record
• automatic assignment of unalterable real-time dates and times for each register entry and updates
• mandatory date and time fields for incidents
• automatic assignment of an approved user name - via login - to each entry which includes incident reporting and updates
• no capacity to delete or edit existing incident records, but allows relevant information to be added at a later date
• an audit trail capacity that ensures all versions of any incident are saved and available for review upon request. For example an audit trail that ensures all versions are saved and can be viewed separately
• ability to flag incomplete entries for reportable incidents
• ability to flag entries for reportable incidents where details were not recorded as soon as practicable (e.g. full details after six hours of occurring).

Any information recorded in the DIR, and any reports generated from it, must be able to be:

• made immediately available upon request by a police officer or inspector
• copied, printed or sent digitally so that it can be removed from the venue upon request by a police officer or inspector, and
• retained for a period for a least three years from when the record was made.

Licensed venues must be able to access any digital data records upon request regardless of any contractual arrangements with the software or internet provider. Venues may choose to download their DIR onto their own digital devices or print out paper-based versions of incident reports.

The DIR software must also:

• support search and reporting functions for extracting incident records by date, time, date and time range, day of week, year, incident type, reportable incidents, flagged incidents, system user
• be able to be exported, upon request, in an appropriate digital form (excel or CSV) with each incident assigned to an individual row.

Our compliance inspectors and police review incident registers when they audit a licensed premises. You may face prosecution if you don't maintain your incident register properly.