Music Venue Trust pen open letter to Boris Johnson asking to legally close venues

The letter is written on "behalf of the 661 members of the Music Venues Alliance". They write, "We need you to act immediately to legally enforce the temporary closure of Grassroots Music Venues. If you do not act to do so, your government will be responsible for the permanent closure and loss of hundreds of these vital and vibrant parts of our communities in every corner of the United Kingdom."

Music Venue Trust CEO Mark Davyd adds that grassroots venues "are the cornerstone of our identity as the world’s leading musical innovators, vital to our £5.2 billion music industry and essential to the culture and social interaction of our communities."

The letter goes on to list the issues that venues could face, "Those with insurance cannot claim on it. Those with lease agreements based on trade are in breach of their contracts. Rent, mortgage, rates, VAT, Tax, wages will have to be paid and the entire liability falls on the individual venue operator. We work with those venue operators every day; your announcement has provoked a new public health crisis of unmanageable stress and mental health challenges among this community that was completely unnecessary and could have been avoided."

Davyd also discuss a way to improve support for grassroots music venues, which would cost the UK government less than £40million, "Prior to your statement yesterday, Music Venue Trust supplied a full breakdown to the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport detailing the financial cost of mothballing these venues for temporary closure in a planned and constructed action. That action would see them protected and able to reopen when this crisis is over. We laid out the cost for you; £11.4million now to protect the supply chain, people’s jobs, homes, businesses, and £3.7 million per week to maintain them while they are closed. For eight weeks, the total cost would be less than £40 million."

Music Venue Trust have also brought up a solution as to how the government can fund that £40million, "We want to propose a simple solution and give you that choice: Cancel the 2022 Festival of Great Britain. The government has committed £120 million to delivering an event that no one in the public has demanded, and many sectors of the public simply do not want. It has little backing in the cultural and creative industries and is neither urgent nor necessary. The entire Grassroots Music Venue sector can be mothballed for eight weeks and saved permanently for just one third of the money you have already allocated to this single event."