AAA White Paper The political economy of informal events, 2030 | Page 63

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green spaces is useful here.
Over about a dozen festivals a year, the festival organiser We Are The
Fair, one of the co-publishers of this White Paper, pays local authorities
a total of more than £1m to hire green space, bringing in anything
from 10,000 to 50,000 participants to each of its events. Straight into
the coffers of several local authorities, the company pays rates of up to
£5 per participant per day (up to more like £8 for the whole of two-day
event). UK festival companies, then, pay local authorities an average of
something like £50,000 per event, and quite often lay out more.
Now take just 2000 of Britain’s 2019 total of 2,850 music festivals
(Chart 1) as being staged on land owned by local authorities. In total,
that would give them an annual total minimum of £100m in hiring fees.
Moreover, this total does not include the other, indirect revenues local
authorities get from events – through parking charges, for example.
A cynic might argue that £100m is peanuts against what the LGA
reckons will be a shortage of funds for local government amounting to
£5.8bn in 2019/20. But that would miss the point. A local authority such
as London’s Haringey Council hires out green spaces to event organisers
to the tune of £1m, a year, over perhaps 10 events. Therefore if just 200
of the UK’s more than 400 local and unitary authorities matched the
events revenues of Haringey and other councils, that would bring
them in £200m.
Perhaps every council, like the towns and cities of the ancient Greeks
and the Romans, needs its own amphitheatre, or something like that.
Anyway: if, by 2030, more, bigger and – above all – very innovative
events spread to a clear majority of councils, they might be able to
offset their funding hardships by £300-400m.
That’s not to be sniffed at. But perhaps an equally important point
is that revenues from events in urban green spaces represent, even
today, quite a lot of money as far as the planting, maintenance and
supervision of those spaces goes.
Local authorities are unlikely ever to hive off events revenues
reaped from green spaces so as to fund their upkeep directly (what
policy wonks call ‘hypothecation’). Yet councils could do much more,
and will anyway be required to do much more, to convey to residents
the size of the cash cushion they already get from events – a cushion
that, by 2030, could help keep green spaces in good shape, streets
swept, and local rate rises suppressed.