THREE off licences will be closed over the Halloween weekend after selling alcohol to underage children.

Dino’s Off Licence in Mawney Road, Romford, will close on Saturday, October 30 and Sunday, October 31 after their licence was suspended for 48 hours at a licensing meeting on Tuesday and the Costcutter Stores in Station Lane, Hornchurch and Collier Row Road, Collier Row, will also be shut at 9am on Friday, October 29 and will not reopen until 9am on Sunday, October 31.

The licensing meeting at Havering Town Hall heard that staff at Dino’s sold alcohol to under age volunteers working with Havering council’s trading standards officers in July and sold to another underage person in November last year.

The Hornchurch Costcutters sold a bottle of wine to a 16-year-old volunteer working with trading standards officers on Saturday, October 2 and on the same day the Collier Row store sold a bottle of wine to a volunteer.

It is the second time that both stores have sold alcohol to an underage person in recent weeks and the staff who made the sales were given �80 fixed penalty notices.

Havering Council used new Government powers to close the Costcutter stores without a licence review hearing because the underage sales were so close together as part of a project started at the beginning of the summer holidays to clamp down on underage sales.

Cabinet Member with responsibility for licensing Cllr Geoff Starns said: “We are coming down hard on these premises as we don’t want residents to have their lives disturbed by alcohol related trouble.”