POLICE and council staff closed down a Bournemouth club because they wrongly thought they had been tampering with CCTV footage.

Hundreds of guests were turned away from their pre-booked Halloween party at Priva in Poole Hill after Bournemouth’s licensing sub-committee suspended its licence on Friday, October 28 following a fast-track review.

Dorset Police also arrested two people on suspicion of perverting the course of justice when they discovered 96 seconds had been wiped off one night’s footage.

But Bournemouth licensing solicitor Philip Day soon discovered what the police thought was tampering was in fact the CCTV system closing down at 3am every day to reboot.

News of the mix-up emerged during yesterday’s Bournemouth Borough Council’s licensing committee meeting.

Mr Day told members he approached John Westwood, CCTV expert for Azon Security, who informed him it would be “impossible” to delete a couple of minutes of CCTV footage from the hard drive.

“Within 15/20 minutes I discovered that, like all computer systems, the CCTV system has to reboot to set itself and that CCTV system had been set to reboot at 3am. For the vast majority of businesses that is the quietest time to reboot.”

The following day – October 29 - Dorset Police checked previous CCTV footage from the club and confirmed at 3am there was again a gap of 96 seconds, Mr Day told the committee.

The decision to suspend the licence was immediately reversed.

Mr Day, of Horsey Lightly Fynn, said other clubs in Bournemouth use the same CCTV system and Mr Westwood has changed the rebooting time to 10am.

He added: “If the police had given me the courtesy of telling me they were carrying out the expedite review what I did at 4pm on the Friday, I could have done on Thursday and then come along to the meeting on Friday and explained why it happened.

“It’s been very damaging for the premises.” He said Dorset Police say they are taking no action with criminal proceedings for perverting the course of justice and apologised in an email to council officers but not directly to the club.

Mr Day asked the committee to make every effort to ensure licensees and those representing them were given notice of review hearings to enable them to make representations.

“It will save everyone a great deal of time, trouble and money.”

The committee agreed and voted to ensure, where possible, licensees were notified of a proposed meeting.

Speaking after the hearing, premises supervisor Nikki Claxton said the closure has been hugely damaging for the club and cost it thousands of pounds.

“No matter how many times you tell people it was all a big mistake, they still tend to think it closed for a reason.”