This from Terry Redmond
It's 156,000 licensed premises AND 23,000 clubs (presumably no liquor licences but with PEL) making 179,000 premises - I couldn/t be botheresd to work the figures accurately, it still works out at over £200,000 each That's over the ten year period that the licence is in force for. So it's an AVERAGE of more than £20,000 per year the govenment wants to screw from each of the premises. That's the end of figures quoted from the White Paper.
Now my comments. Your local pub may have to find only £5000 extra per year, under a tenner a week each, while something the size of the old Wembley Complex might have to find an extra million or so per year. These figures are peanuts in capital cities but for small rural pubs, local breweries etc. they could be the difference between making a working income and going bankrupt.
So if you want the future of entertainment in this country to be to sit on your arse and listen to commercial entertainment while drinking mass produced drinks at top prices, just keep arguing and nit picking. That's what you are heading for. No more sing arounds, blues evenings, jam sessions. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Just sit and listen, buy the CD and the T-shirt and drink your lager from a plastic glass from a pressurised aluminium barrel.
I'm pissed off with the whole thing, if folkies and other amateur musicians want to dither about and get priced out of existence and fobbed off with claptrap from Cabinet Ministers and Festival organisers let them do it. The opening paragraph of section 13 concludes with the sentence "This means that even if the proposed streamlined and simplified system reduces costs, it may be neccessary to increase the fees from their present level".
Using this analogy, if the price of crude oil falls, it may be neccesary to put up the price of petrol. But if the price of oil rises, it may be neccesary to put up the price of petrol. And we all know how much cheaper petrol is today than ten years ago, don't we?