Approaches to preventing sales

If you sell age-restricted products to a person under the minimum legal age, you may commit an offence. To be able to defence yourself, ‘due diligence’ defence;

You must prove that you took ‘all reasonable precautions / all reasonable steps’ and exercised ‘all due diligence’ to avoid committing an offence.

This means that you are responsible for making sure that you and your staff do not sell age-restricted products to people under the minimum legal age. You can do this by setting up effective systems within your business.

Best-practice features of an effective system include:

• Age verification checks. Verify the age of potential buyers by asking to see an identity card.
• Challenge 21 / Challenge 25. Carry out age verification checks on anyone who looks younger than 21 or 25.
• Staff training. Make sure your staff receive adequate training on underage sales. Keep a training record and make sure the training is regularly updated
• Use of till prompts. You can use prompts that appear on the till when an age-restricted product is scanned to remind staff to carry out age verification checks
• Store layout, signage and CCTV. Ensure you have adequate signs to inform consumers of the minimum legal age to purchase. You are legally required to display notices for tobacco and fireworks
• Record Keeping. Keep and maintain staff training records, CCTV maintanence records and a refusals register, this means keeping a record (date, time, incident, description of potential buyer) where sales of age-restricted products have been refused.