U.K. LIVE BIZ ASKS FOR CONCERT CONTINGENCY FUND

With the U.K.’s 2021 festival season looking increasingly precarious, trade body LIVE has made a new bid to the government to save it, asking for a contingency fund to be made available for events that have to cancel.

To encourage events to take the risk of keeping summer dates in the hope that the government's pilot events scheme proves successful and they can proceed, LIVE has requested that a fund be created from some of the £400m unspent money that’s part of the Cultural Recovery Fund. It would offer partial protection to organizers should events have to cancel because of a public health decision; insurance for all other issues would be handled in the usual way.

Calls for cancellation insurance have as yet gone unanswered and, as a result, a number of events have postponed for another year. Greg Parmley, Chief Executive of LIVE, said that without some form of contingency fund in place, "the risk of undertaking activity this summer will simply be too great for the majority of events" and that cancellations will become "a flood" in the coming weeks if a solution isn’t found.

The live music industry thinks that using unspent Culture Recovery Money to create a contingency pot to provide some form of protection for events is the best way to get money through the entire live music ecosystem—from artists and venues to technical staff and freelance crew—by enabling people to get back to work,” he said.

Speaking to The Guardian, a spokesperson for the Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport said they are “aware of the wider concerns about securing indemnity for live events and are exploring what further support we may provide.”