Challenge 25 and age verification at the till

What Challenge 25 is, and is not

Challenge 25 is a retailing policy: if a customer buying an age-restricted product looks under 25, ask for identification. It is not itself legislation. The legislation is the offence of selling age-restricted goods to someone underage, and the defence available to you is that you took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence.

That defence is the whole point. Challenge 25 is the accepted evidence of reasonable precautions, and it is written into most licensing conditions in the UK. Trading Standards and licensing officers expect it, and a shop operating Challenge 21 or nothing at all is starting from a weaker position if a test purchase fails.

What is age restricted

• 18+: alcohol, tobacco and cigarette papers, vapes and nicotine products, lottery tickets and scratchcards, fireworks, solvents and aerosol paints, knives and bladed articles, petrol, some DVDs and games by classification.
• 16+: some solvents, party poppers and certain caps depending on local rules.
• Local variation exists. Licensing conditions attached to a premises licence can add requirements, and they override any general guidance including this page.

Where a till helps, and where it does not

No system verifies age. A person does that, by looking at identification. What a system can do is make the check impossible to skip, and make the record of it survive.

A prompt that stops rather than reminds

There is a meaningful difference between a message that appears and a sale that will not continue. A message is dismissed by muscle memory within a week of a new member of staff starting. A hard stop that needs an explicit confirmation cannot be. This matters most at exactly the moment it should — a queue, a Friday evening, a member of staff who started on Monday.

A refusal that is recorded properly

The traditional refusals book is a paper pad by the till, and its weakness is obvious: it gets filled in later, or not at all, and there is no way to show it was contemporaneous. A refusal recorded at the till carries a timestamp, the operator who made it and the line involved, automatically, at the moment it happened.

A record that still reads in six months

A licensing visit or a test purchase failure is reviewed long after the event. What you need at that point is a report you can produce showing challenges made, refusals recorded and who was on the till, over a date range. That is a reporting question rather than a till question, and it is worth checking before you buy.

What a good refusals record contains

• Date and time, recorded automatically rather than written down afterwards.
• The member of staff who made the refusal, by name, from their own login.
• The product or category involved.
• Whether identification was requested, and whether it was produced.
• A brief reason, chosen from a short list so it is consistent between staff.

The rest of a defensible policy

The till is one part. The others are the ones a licensing officer will ask about, so they are worth being straight about.

• Training records for every member of staff who serves, signed and dated, and repeated rather than done once at induction.
• Signage at the entrance and at the till stating the policy.
• A named designated premises supervisor and staff who know who that is.
• Regular internal test purchases, and a record of what happened.
• CCTV covering the till, retained for the period your licence requires.

How epos-365 handles it

A restricted line stops the sale at the till until it is authorised, rather than showing a message that can be dismissed. The authorisation is recorded against the operator’s own login, and refusals are logged with the time, the operator and the line. The record is a report in the back office rather than a pad by the till, so it can be produced for a licensing visit months later. The detail sits on the till software page, and the off-licence case specifically on off-licence EPOS.