Decrying the current economic climate for the music industry as “an incredibly worrying scene”, Liberal Democrat MP and leadership hopeful Layla Moran urged the prime minister yesterday to set aside a fund to protect the future of UK music venues in the long term. Moran warned that thousands of job losses and the permanent closure of many small venues were inevitable without immediate government intervention.
Calling the proposed £900 million necessary to keep live venues afloat “an investment in our country’s cultural future”, Moran told NME that “we need to have recognition that [the] arts in this country [are] one of our most important exports”. The figure comes from the trade body UK Music, who estimate that the lockdown enforced by social distancing measures will cut the £1.1 billion generated by the country’s live music industry by more than 80%.
Despite her tenure as the MP for Oxford West and Abingdon consisting of only a few years (after unseating Nicola Blackwood in 2017), Moran has consistently used her platform to campaign for the protection of live music venues. In 2018 she advocated implementing the ‘Planning (Agent of Change) Bill’ which would have required developers to take account of a new building scheme’s effect on existing music spaces, and last September she supported a party policy motion to list live music venues as ‘Assets of Community Value’, protected from closure through legislative changes.
That commitment by the Liberal Democrats was a collaboration with UK Music as well as the Music Venue Trust, the organisation behind the #saveourvenues campaign. The national crowdfunder has raised more than a million pounds in aid of music venues across the country, salvaging around 140 establishments from closing down as a result of the nationwide lockdown. But there’s still more to be done. Speaking to NME in May, the CEO of UK Music Trust Mark Davyd noted that while removing those venues from critical condition was “a cause for celebration”, there were still more than 400 that were in real danger of closing down over the coming months. Read more about the #saveourvenues campaign here.
