For years, it has felt that with successive governments, the argument for protecting grassroots music venues has been treated as a nice idea stuck in the folder marked ‘we must get round to this’.
Today, in his first week as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham opened that folder and finally did something about it.
The announcement is simple. From April 2027, live music venues, alongside pubs and other hospitality venues, will receive a 20 per cent relief on their business rates, on top of the 15 per cent already granted this year.
At Music Venue Trust, we support grassroots music venues, and we know how important this news is.
For places operating on margins so thin they barely qualify as margins, that is not a technicality.
It is the difference between paying the electricity bill and not, between keeping a sound engineer on the books and not, between a town having a platform for new bands to play their first gig and having another vacant unit with a ‘to let’ sign gathering dust in the window.
What makes this matter is not just the money. It is the speed. Burnham committed to this before he became Prime Minister, and delivered it within a week of taking office.
No commission, no green paper, no eighteen months of ‘further consultation is required’.
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A problem was identified, a solution existed, and the government did it. If that becomes the operating pattern of this administration, that is significant, and not just for music venues.
Because the same pattern – identify the fix, do the fix – could be applied right across the list of things the hospitality sector has been waiting on for years.
Ownership models that let communities buy the cultural buildings they love rather than having to rent them from landlords who see more value in a supermarket.
Reducing VAT on tickets.
Removing VAT on the grassroots levy that the industry itself agreed to pay.
Enforcing Agent of Change, so a new block of flats cannot move in next to a venue that has operated for decades and then complain about the noise. None of these are complicated.
All of them have been sitting in the folder, pursued by organisations like mine for years.
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What this relief actually buys the sector, and the wider hospitality industry, is breathing space, and breathing space is exactly what is needed to have a harder conversation properly, rather than having a vital facet of British public life in a permanent state of emergency.
That conversation is about clicks versus bricks – in which a digital economy enjoys a hands-off approach while physical places communities gather, the pub, the restaurant,your local music venue are closing under the pressure of a tax regime that cannot recognise their social and community value.
It’s about a business rates and valuation system that rewards the maximisation of every square foot of a town centre and has no mechanism for valuing what a building means to the people who live around it.
A system that does not value what a venue gives back to a place – the sense of belonging, the life-changing gig, the reason a town has anywhere for people to be together in the evening. Instead it solely values what a retail unit would pay for the site.
Over 40 years ago Ray Davies of The Kinks neatly summed this up: ‘Before that they put up a bowling alley, on the site that used to be the local palais’. We are still knocking down our palais, just with better spreadsheets.
That is the long-term fix that has to follow this short-term relief; a revaluation process that stops treating cultural and community value as a rounding error.
In Manchester, grassroots music venues already saw this approach brought into real life policy when Andy Burnham was Mayor;policies from transport to licensing to business rates tested and reimagined to ensure they are delivering for the local community not against their interests.
We now have two years before the next full revaluation of business rates to get things right, so that this kind of urgent, welcome, but ultimately patch-up relief is not something a government has to keep finding £100 million for every few years just to stop the bleeding.
None of this is to pretend the government has an easy run of it.
There is no shortage of crises competing for Andy Burnham’s attention, and grassroots music is, in the scale of a nation’s problems, a small one, even for one that loves music as much as him.
But that is what makes this action both encouraging and a little frustrating at the same time.
This did not need to take years. It only needed a government willing to pick something achievable and simply do it, rather than wait for the perfect, comprehensive solution to every adjacent problem first.
That is the real headline here. Not just twenty per cent off a rates bill, welcome as that is, but a demonstration that this government is prepared to act on what it can fix now.
Do that again, and again, on ownership, on tax, on planning, and people will start to feel something they have not felt in a long time: a government that gets things done, in their community, for something they actually care about.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk.
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