Councillors from the city and Western Bay will take a sober look at the region's drinking habits today as they look to tighten up the availability of liquor in the community.

The outcome of this afternoon's Joint Governance Committee meeting will place limits on the number of local pubs and bars, off-licences, and where and when they can trade.

Councillors will look at drafting a new bylaw for liquor licencing in the Western Bay of Plenty.

Suggestions in the draft policy to be workshopped include a tiered approach where the majority of pubs are contained in the city centre, and the number of pubs and liquor outlets are restricted in suburbs.

The new bylaw that will go out for public consultation comes on the back of research showing the more liquor outlets there are, the more people drink - and the more alcohol related issues there are in a neighbourhood.

The report includes information based on a study in the Auckland suburb of Manukau, which found that every extra off-licence is associated with an additional 42 police events.

Police are seeking a ban on pubs and bars in industrial areas as they don't want outlying commercial precincts like Fraser Cove and Papamoa to develop as ‘entertainment precincts. They say the additional workload will reduce their ability to monitor and deal with the related alcohol issues.

Police want each suburb's ‘police record' of road trauma, drink driving arrests, family and domestic violence and public disorder incidents taken into account whenever liquor licences are considered.

They also want a complete shut out of entertainment style licences in the Western Bay of Plenty, as they usually relate to the sex industry and are an attractor for people to migrate after hours for the purpose of drinking, rather than the entertainment.

Councillors are being asked to equalise the drinking hours in Mount Maunganui and the Tauranga CBD due to the numbers of drink drivers caught migrating across the Harbour Bridge for an extra two hour's drinking after the Mount bars shut at 1am.

Other factors having a bearing on the future liquor licences will be their proximity to other liquor outlets, and how close they are to schools and or churches.

Hospitality NZ says Tauranga and the Western Bay of Plenty have an excessive amount of liquor outlets and club licences for its current population and recommends councillors adopt a sinking lid policy.