Cllr Chris White, Chair of the LGA's Culture, Tourism and Sport board, said:
"Common sense measures to allow pubs and bars to put on live music with a minimum of bureaucracy are already in place and make further amendments pointless. Resisting the badly thought out plans for new exemption rules are not about automatically saying 'no' to live music. Councils want to be able to say 'yes', confident that local people have been considered as part of the process."
Quite how Cllr White can feel he is speaking on behalf of 'Councils'is not clear but such things are all too common in the strange world of the LGA Group. It would be nice to think that these comments are really made on the behalf of local people. However not all local people feel they need to complain and many of these local people are also involved in live music and would feel that their concerns are seldom considered in the current process.
For example, the LGA submission to the recent DCMS consultation on small premises, states that the LGA Group is against such exemptions as proposed. At the same time, there are are submissions from some member Councils which express a different view.
One example is from a council where it was the Licensing Committee itself which made a submission in support of the proposal. The majority of submissions from employees claiming to speak as the Councils in question do tend to support the view already expressed on their behalf, in the LGA Group submission.
It would be nice to accept at face value, Cllr White's view that Councils want to be able to say yes to live music. That many council employees and councillors feel they have every right to have a say in matters where many of us would rather they did not and in which many would doubt their basic understanding, is certainly the case.
However, my experience is that this involvement and the expensive red-tape is presenting the one single obstacle to the health and spread of live music in all of its forms. Is it really Councils who should be saying yes or no to live music or is Cllr White presuming too much?
A Councils role is to ensure only that premises are safe and suitable for whatever the public are to use them for. Their expertise is in these areas and not in the many forms of live music that they affect and those who have this expertise should be respected and consulted where too often they are ignored or worse.
Thus we have a crazy system where the latest guidance is that the same live music is expected to be judged licensable by these councils if the name of the musician appears in the advert but not licensable if the advert simply states that some form of live music is to take place.
Where it is true that Councils are not directly responsible for such legislation - one may hope that they would accept that their expertise is not in such matters and they would make some moves to address this. Sadly they would seem content to not only work with it but, in the form of the LGA Group, were the main movers in the development of the latest guidance on the interpretation of the Act's incidental exemption.
The other parties in this consultation are also culpable but it is the LGA Group who would seem happy that Council employees continue to be expected to make vital subjective decisions that are not within their area of expertise.
They are expected to rule if a live music activity is licensable or not, based on how the seating is arranged. Arranged in circle, it is not licensable but facing in one direction, it is licensable. If it is deemed to be licensable and proceeds without the required additional licensing permission, the operator could face prosecution, a £20,000 fine or 6 months in prison.