OPINION and Dancehall repeatedly being treated as inherently‘ high risk’. The shadow of Form 696, abolished in 2017, remains visible in the way Black music events are assessed.
One contributor described police requirements for 26 officers at £ 56 an hour. Another promoter received an unexpected £ 10,000 security bill shortly before an event. REMEL records a Black cultural festival facing security costs of around £ 100,000, substantially affecting what could be spent on production and artists.
One anonymised contributor described how additional security requirements could add £ 10,000 –£ 15,000 to a Black music event. The show then looks poor on the P & L and management concludes that this type of programming does not make money.
Except audience demand was not necessarily the problem, it was the additional cost. The wider numbers are equally significant.
REMEL estimates that Black and South Asian music is connected to around £ 1.1 billion of London’ s live-music spending. Yet, between £ 127 million and £ 141m in spending is being lost annually, potentially more than £ 650m over five years. Among respondents affected by cancellation, 86 % reported reputational damage, 43 % lost further work and 79 % said they would programme more Black and South Asian music if the risk of police intervention were reduced. That last number should concern everybody in live music. It tells us that we are not simply losing events that reach the point of cancellation. We may be losing events that are never proposed, artists who are never booked and promoters who decide the financial risk is simply too great.
REMEL’ s analysis of Temporary Event Notices( TEN) found a positive correlation between the ethnic diversity of London boroughs and the proportion receiving counter-notices. That does not, by itself, prove discrimination. But it raises precisely the kind of disparity a fair licensing system should be capable of examining. The research also found inconsistencies between authorities, with even licensing officers acknowledging that standards and approaches can vary between councils and agencies.
Then there are the structural barriers. The City of London has conditions such as“ No Promoted Events” which can prevent venues from working with independent promoters and artists. Cumulative Impact Zones can create a presumption against new licensed activity in areas already under pressure. For grassroots and culturally specific events, these policies can determine who is able to enter the market in the first place.
And every licensing condition has an economic consequence. So our recommendations are practical.
If authorities call an event“ high risk”, the evidence should be specific, verifiable and contestable. Promoters should have a meaningful opportunity to respond before an event is lost. Police and security costs should be transparent and proportionate. TEN decisions need better data and clearer evidential thresholds. We want independent review where disputes cannot be resolved, cultural competence within licensing and policing, and better training and professional pathways for promoters themselves.
“ PUBLIC SAFETY SHOULD PROTECT CULTURAL LIFE, NOT GRADUALLY POLICE IT OUT OF EXISTENCE.”
None of this is an argument against public safety. It is an argument against over-policing being mistaken for public safety.
REMEL shows what happens when particular genres, artists and audiences repeatedly enter the system carrying a presumption of risk. The consequence is not confined to a single event. It shapes what venues are prepared to programme, which promoters are willing to take the financial risk and which artists get access to the stages where careers are built.
This is how culture can be pushed out without anyone ever having to ban it outright.
Make it harder to stage. More expensive to insure. More burdensome to license. More costly to defend. Eventually, the barriers do the work of the ban and people stop trying.
When that happens, the loss is much bigger than one cancelled night. Emerging artists lose opportunities. Venues become more cautious. Audiences have fewer places to discover music. Promoters leave the sector. Local businesses lose the spending that events bring to the high street. Whole music scenes have less space in which to grow.
That is why REMEL asks licensing to recognise live music not simply as an activity carrying potential risk, but as cultural and economic infrastructure. A venue can be a place of employment, an entry point for emerging talent, a driver of footfall and local spending, and part of the identity of an area. Once those spaces disappear, they are not easily replaced.
This is the thinking behind our recommendation for Cultural Impact Assessments. Licensing rightly considers the possible consequences of allowing an event to proceed. It should also consider the consequences of losing it.
How many jobs disappear? Where does the emerging artist play next? What happens to the venue? What does the high street lose? And what happens when a community gradually loses the spaces in which its culture is made?
The question is not whether public safety matters. Of course it does. The question is whether we can regulate genuine risk without allowing assumptions about race, genre or audience to create disproportionate barriers to participation.
Public safety should protect cultural life, not gradually police it out of existence.
That is the challenge REMEL puts before the live events industry and government: make decisions based on evidence, apply risk proportionately, and ensure Black and South Asian culture has the same fair opportunity to survive, grow and thrive.
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