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Gordon Brown is set to keep controversial 24-hour drinking laws despite announcing during his first weeks in office that he was personally reviewing their impact, The Times has learnt. The move to allow pubs and clubs to stay open later into the night has been widely blamed for contributing to a surge in binge drinking and alcohol-fuelled violence across England and Wales.

The climbdown comes as ambulance services reported a record number of emergency calls on New Year’s Eve. Crews in some areas responded to up to 37 per cent more calls than the year before.

The Government’s review on the liberalisation of licensing laws, which is due to report within weeks, is expected to dismiss claims that all-day licensing has contributed to binge drinking and instead to conclude that the new rules have broadly worked well with the need for only minor changes.

Mr Brown will instead focus on tackling the culture of drinking with moves such as stamping out the drinking of alcohol on streets and tougher enforcement of existing laws, particularly those forbidding the sale of alcohol to minors.

The outcome will be seen as a U-turn by Mr Brown, who told his first Downing Street press conference as Prime Minister in July that he recognised there were “strong feelings” about 24-hour drinking and he had himself looked at the evidence of its impact, although he reserved a final judgment pending a review.

That statement was seen as another attempt to break with Tony Blair’s legacy, after Mr Brown killed plans for a supercasino in Manchester in a re-think of the liberalisation of gaming laws and ordered a review of the decision to reclassify cannabis from a Class B to a Class C drug.

The Times has learned that the departments and bodies that have made submissions to the review of the Licensing Act, which was passed in 2003 but took effect two years later, are generally satisfied that it is working as intended and say the criticism is exaggerated or misplaced.

Ministers and officials at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which is collating the study, talk of making “adjustments” to the law but leaving its structure in place, concentrating instead on areas such as restrictions on live music in pubs, clubs and restaurants.

Despite signs of a rise in alcohol-in-duced admissions to A&E since the reform, the Department of Health has raised no objection to 24-hour drinking and says that its own monitoring of five major hospitals, including in Newcastle, indicated no significant change. One health official said: “If there is evidence of people coming to A&E with alcohol-related problems, how do we prove it is licensing laws that caused that or not?”

Chief constables have also dropped their opposition to later drinking hours, despite concern in some forces that that change has displaced trouble in town and city centres to the early hours of the morning, making it more costly to police.

Initial Home Office figures showed that crime fell around the traditional 11pm closing time across England and Wales in the first year after the new licensing laws but there was a rise in offences committed after midnight.

Local councils, which took control of licensing from magistrates courts as part of the change, are also behind the new law which gives them and local police greater powers to restrict, suspend or remove licenses of rowdy premises or to limit opening hours.

Paul Raynes, of the Local Government Association, said: “Broadly the framework the Act set up works pretty comfortably. There are other issues about the culture of drinking”

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