If we judge it necessary to refuse your licence application we will write to you, providing the basis for our decision and inviting you to supply further information. You will then have twenty-one days fron the date on our decision letter to provide a response.

If we do not receive a response from you within the twenty-one days the decision to refuse you a licence will automatically take effect. We will not write again to confirm this. Once the decision to refuse you a licence takes effect you will have twenty-one days in which to exercise a right of appeal to a Magistrate's Court, Sheriff Court or District Court.

If you do send in a response we will give it due consideration, and we will write to you to inform you of our final decision. If we decide it is still necessary to refuse your licence, you will then have twenty-one days from the date of this second decision letter in which to exercise a right of appeal to a Magistrate's Court, Sheriff Court or District Court.

Please note that costs may be involved with a court appeal, both in lodging the appeal and if you lose the appeal at court. When deciding if you wish to bring an appeal to court you may like to bear in mind the High Court case of Security Industry Authority v Stewart & Others (2007), which ruled that magistrate's courts must follow the criteria set out in our 'Get Licensed' booklet when considering appeals. As an example, magistrate's courts considering decisions we have made as a result of our criminality criteria cannot consider factors outside of those criteria, such as the circumstances or gravity of the offence(s) committed.

Further Information Requested

The type of further information you will be invited to provide to us will depend on which category you fall into in our published licensing criteria. If you have been refused a licence on the grounds of criminality, your category will have been determined by how relevant, how recent, and how serious the offences on your criminal record are.

Where you are an automatic refusal, you will only be invited to tell us of any factual errors in our assessment - for example, an error in respect of your identity, or an error in assessing your qualifications or criminal history. We will then consider your submissions in reaching our final decision

In other cases where you are not an automatic refusal and you fall into the 'consider additional factors' category, you will be invited to provide mitigation. We will then consider your submissions when making our final decision.