The following exchange between Mr Bridgett of the DCMS and Richard Bridge will explain what is happening (in private).

From: ronnie.bridgett@Culture.gsi.gov.uk
[mailto:ronnie.bridgett@Culture.gsi.gov.uk]
Sent: 15 May 2002 17:53

Dear Mr Bridge

Thank you for your e-mail correspondence to Dr Howells. I have been asked to reply on his behalf.

If I may take your last point first, there was, as you know, a detailed licensing review between 1997 to 1999 on all aspects of licensing, which led to the publication of the Government's White Paper, "Time for Reform", in April 2000. All areas of the licensed trade were involved in that review as were performers, the local authorities, the police, magistrates and other stakeholder groups. The White Paper attracted responses from 1200 individuals and bodies, one of which was from the Association of British Jazz. As the Government is adhering to the policies set out in the White Paper, we believe that the quote from the Association of British Jazz is a valid comment on the Government's proposals for reform.

In your e-mail, you enquired about the Instructions For Parliamentary Counsel. I must point out that these are not a document in the public domain. Similarly, the adequacy of definitions used in primary legislation is a matter for Parliament.

There is no current intention to publish an advance draft of the licensing Bill before it is presented in Parliament. We do, however, intend to discuss some of the issues with interested stakeholders in working groups. Invitations which have gone out include proprieters of musical venues and performers. As I have remarked in a previous e-mail to you, this is not a public consultation.

Finally, in response to your concern that local councils might overcharge for permission to stage public performances, I am able to confirm that fees will be controlled and set centrally by the Government to prevent the excesses which have occurred in some local authority areas.

Yours sincerely
Ronnie Bridgett Alcohol & Entertainment Licensing Branch Tourism Division

Dear Mr Bridgett

I am afraid you have not got the point, or you are trying to evade the point, about the quote from the ABJ. At the time the letter in question was written, no-one imagined that the 2-in-a-bar rule was to be abolished and not replaced with another exemption. To say that there had been consultation about liquor licensing (and about full PEL licensing, which was, at the time, mostly assumed to be irrelevant to folk music) so that any concern now expressed is untimely is a ritual of formalism far distant from any idea of an informed democracy. The letter is also a letter very plainly about the money available to pay performers - which is not a point of relevance to amateurs.

Even if the letter were not irrelevant at the moment for these reasons, in any event the ABJ do not make government policy nor determine its correctness or otherwise and the supposed fact that they approved of your intentions would not of itself justify your intentions if the ABJ were wrong. Your response on this point is therefore at best unattractively disingenuous. Strangely, as I type, I hear a reporter on the television speaking of the government's perceived lack of acknowledgment of the concerns of voters.

You are quite wrong that the definitions in a bill are only a matter for parliament. They are a matter for the proper concern of the voters by whose consent parliament governs. The public at present want to know the effect of the intended legislation. The government on the one hand says that legislation will have certain effects, and on the other hand says that the definitions are in the hands of parliamentary counsel whose instructions are secret. This is not an exercise in open democracy. It is oppression by stealth. To say that you will "reform" the 2-in-a-bar rule and then plan to replace it with a "none-in-a-bar rule" could be called something even less complimentary. You cannot expect the people to trust a government to legislate in the public interest if the government will not be candid about the content of the legislation it intends to put forward.

It is even more remarkable that you speak of an intention to discuss with "stakeholders" (an odd choice of word, I think, for many are properly interested in this debate even if they hold no pecuniary or other specified type of stake) when you have refused to meet the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and when virtually the only government acknowledgment of folk music in the parliamentary debate to date has been the sort of sneer at such music that some might associate with the lowest form of slick spivvishness.

You seem to wish to ignore the fact that the public have spoken, by deed and word, about the licensing of small music. Many have told you that they wanted to be more free to make folk music in pubs. You plan to make them less so. Those whose publicans did not pay for PELs, either because they were within an exemption, or because they wrongly thought they were within an exemption, or who did not care if they were within an exemption, or in practical terms were not the subject of enforcement (when the police so sensibly took the view that they had more important crimes to pursue than singing in bars) will all face an increase in the cost of their music if the proposed new law is enacted as at present intended, and if it is enforced.They will say that a politician's and a civil servant's idea of a modest fee is not theirs - and they will be influenced in this by the eagerness with which local government is fighting to be able to administer and charge for this new layer of bureaucracy. If fees are to be set centrally, and if you want us to be comforted by that, tell us at what level they are to be set. £500 for a PEL (if the pub did not already have one) would bankrupt most folk clubs. Indeed rather less would do so too.

It seems almost fit for the pen of Orwell or Huxley that the department of Culture is presiding over the introduction of legislation that will add licensing fees to and so repress folk music and dance - all the while pretending that a desire to avoid additional bureaucracy prevents the regulation of the antisocial and stifling prevalence of invasive and deafening big screen football or wrestling, or the noise level of juke boxes.

The only way that folk music and dance will be able to survive will be if they are free of the dead hand of local authority (or other) licensing. They should be prized and preserved, even encouraged and subsidised. Once they are extinct it will be too late to revive them.

There are many other follies in the present government position about licensing and folk music and dance, and I will be writing further both as part of the present discussion and for publication.

Foolish laws create disrespect for the law.

Yours sincerely Richard McD. Bridge