Music Venues

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for securing this debate, and I thank all the music-loving Members of the House, of whom I am sure there are more than we have been able to squeeze in to participate in today’s debate. Indeed, it has brought back fond memories of the first Bill that I was involved in, the Live Music Bill, which is now the Live Music Act 2012, which I had the honour of stewarding through from the Opposition Front Bench. Although I declare an interest as a rather part-time member of the Parliament Choir, I have none of the expertise so much on display of those with professional and semi-professional links who have talked about their experiences; I acknowledge how much that has contributed to our debate today. But all of us are here because we share a commitment to the sector in its widest sense, and I hope that that message is loud and clear for the Minister. This is a matter that cuts across all the parties and sectors of the House.

The unanimity of purpose in coming to the debate today has been echoed in a message that the Minister will have picked up, which is that there is common ground here. Grass-roots music venues play a key role in enabling some of the biggest names in music to develop as artists and to build their audiences. They are in some senses incubators, and so protecting these live music venues is crucial to our creative industries. As several noble Lords have observed, they contribute to a sense of place and they add to an area’s desirability as a place to live, work and visit.

This is not just a London problem. Noble Lords have mentioned Cardiff, Lancaster, York and Edinburgh, and there are all too many others. We should congratulate the Mayor of London—I do so publicly today—on setting up the Music Venues Taskforce, which has informed so many of today’s contributions. Perhaps in response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, we should invite other cities to replicate this work and extend it so as to produce the evidence which I am sure would convince Ministers, even if they have not been convinced by what has been said in the debate today.

What exactly is the problem? There is a lot of concern and anxiety around this, and Ministers will want to be sure that they are in the right area on this. It seems to me that we have differential planning, licensing, policing and fiscal policies in play, which means that it is a struggle for those involved to balance the needs of grass-roots music venues with those of residents and businesses. All these are legitimate concerns. But without thinking through the policy implications, tensions are bound to arise. It is obvious that an increasing need for housing means that residential development is taking place cheek-by-jowl with existing night-time activity. This pressure, coupled with rising property prices and increasing costs for grass-roots music venues, is proving, as the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, said, a perfect storm, and as a result venues are closing. This is a very depressing scenario. Everyone has argued that we want to do something about it, but nobody has come up with a very clean and obvious solution that would, with one stroke, solve this. I will just touch on some of the issues that have come up today and invite the Minister to respond to each of them.

First is the agent of change principle, which has received a fair amount of discussion. This puts the onus on the developer to mitigate any future problems which might emerge between newcomers to an area and long-standing local venues. Funnily enough, I came across this the other day on a visit, as part of my secondment to the Metropolitan Police, to an area on the outskirts of London which houses the police mounted brigade. It is fully equipped to look after horses, and obviously with horses come noise—in this case, a forge, which is not quiet but is used through the day and often at night. The adjacent industrial estate is going to be turned into a housing estate, and the Metropolitan Police is concerned that its existing practices and procedures will be affected by future complaints. This is not just a music issue, but is of wider concern.

A number of noble Lords mentioned the debate on the Housing and Planning Bill, in which the Minister, Mr Brandon Lewis, said a number of things about this. I will pick up a slightly different quote, which seemed to me to be a way forward. He not only said, as others have mentioned, that he wants to look further at the matter and has been working with the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy but accepted that:

“If a business is working and a nearby building converts to residential housing … It would be entirely wrong of the people who moved … to complain about the business that existed before the residential housing was there”.—[Official Report, Commons, Housing and Planning Bill Committee, 8/12/15; col. 598.]

When the Minister comes to respond, can he update us on where discussions have got to on this point? There are opportunities coming up in this House which would allow us to take the point further, should that be appropriate.

On business rates, one thing that has not been mentioned up to now but which came up as a live issue in the recent Enterprise Bill—whose Third Reading is still to come—is the question of whether or not there will be action on the rating demands being raised by the VOA on grass-roots music festivals which operate on agricultural land. It is slightly tangential but it bears on the wider point, also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, about the way in which local authorities could affect the incidence of business rates not only on venues but on portable festivals. Again, could the Minister update us on where we have got to on this? I think the last statement on this was from the DCMS Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, who said that,

“if there are no permanent physical adaptations to the land … and the duration of the festival is only a matter of a few days, it is unlikely to attract a rating”.—[Official Report, 2/11/15; col. GC 314.]

However, that is not what is happening on the ground: ratings have been applied and they have been causing problems.

My fourth point follows the rather interesting point made by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, about the feeling in the industry, which I think is genuine, that there is overregulation of the activity here. It is easy to knock regulation—good regulation is essential for the proper functioning of a good society—but it may be that perhaps the better regulation unit in BIS could be asked to apply a task-oriented focus on this area to see whether it could come up with some plans for deregulation which would both satisfy the Government’s overall aim to have two out for every one in and relieve some of the problems of the music industry.

Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Foster, reminded us that music can have a restorative effect on social cohesion and health. Can the Minister sketch out for us what his department is doing to spread the word about why DWP, DH and CLG should be working with DCMS to make sure that music is supported in this way?