Proportionality!

You don't risk activities that present little or no public risk, by including them in measures designed for activities that may present a risk. It means you address only the places where a real risk to the public is presented.

Unless a licensee was able to predict the future, and know a folk club would need a home, it would not be possible, as now to approach them and ask if you could stage a folk club in their pub.

The licensee when making application for his combined premises licence would have to state in advance that they wished to have the entertainment element. They would have to place in an operating plan, the specific nature of this entertainment (a folk club, or even one singer), and wait to have it approved and any conditions placed on it by the local authority. And this is sold to us cutting red tape and the entertainment element being free!

In reality this "no money changing hands" is a nonsense, when you are talking of making music (even unpaid) on commercial premises. For officers can (and will) always claim that some indirect reward is involved, I suspect that Dr Howells is well aware of this, whilst making these reassuring statements to the (small) folk community.

How can they justify these measures, as they continue to try do on the public's safety and interests, if an unpaid and amplified) event is free from the requirement, just because no money changes hands?

You will see further qualifications to this emerging, for the DCMS have already specified the need for any future exempt public music making to not only be non rewarded but also to be totally "spontaneous".

Difficult to maintain that one just happened to have one's double bass with you in the pub when spontaneous music making broke out! ....But in all reality, why should you have to make such an attempt, if the licensing requirement is really for reasons of public safety etc? The risks of any music making are plainly the same - rewarded or not.

I suggest that we have to step up rather than relax For the (unpaid) folk activity argument, and the Governments lame attempts to enable these events in order to placate us, are demonstrating the whole bogus argument for the continued blanket licensing of music.

If not required in Scotland, where the same safety legislation is thought sufficient, how can it be justified to us and still tolerated by us in England and Wales?

It was a shame that the interview was allowed to be on the grounds of us all having 'cake tomorrow'. We have lost too many events already and will lose more now and in the years before we ever see this new legislation, even if it ever should contain measures that will protect music making from officialdom.