Andy Burnham, in his first week as Prime Minister, has delivered a 20 per cent business rates relief for grassroots music venues and other hospitality venues, effective from April 2027. This is on top of the 15 per cent relief already granted this year. Mark Davyd, founder and CEO of Music Venue Trust, a charity supporting grassroots venues, hailed the move as a decisive action that breaks years of inaction from previous governments.
Swift action on a long-standing issue
Davyd noted that the argument for protecting grassroots music venues has often been treated as a nice idea stuck in a folder marked 'we must get round to this'. Burnham, however, opened that folder and acted within a week of taking office. No commission, no green paper, no lengthy consultations. The speed of the announcement is significant, as it demonstrates a government willing to identify a problem and implement a solution immediately.
For venues operating on razor-thin margins, this relief is not a technicality. It is the difference between paying the electricity bill or not, keeping a sound engineer on staff or not, and having a platform for new bands to play their first gig versus having another vacant unit with a 'to let' sign. Davyd emphasized that this breathing space is crucial for the sector to address deeper issues without being in a permanent state of emergency.
Broader implications for hospitality
Davyd highlighted that the same pattern of identifying and fixing problems could be applied to other long-standing issues in the hospitality sector. These include community ownership models for cultural buildings, reducing VAT on tickets, removing VAT on the grassroots levy, and enforcing the Agent of Change principle to protect venues from noise complaints by new developments. None of these are complicated, yet they have been sitting in the folder for years.
The relief buys the sector time to have a harder conversation about the business rates system. Davyd argued that the current system values a site based on what a retail unit would pay, ignoring the social and community value of venues. This is a system that rewards maximization of every square foot of a town centre and has no mechanism for valuing what a building means to the people around it.
Long-term fixes needed
Davyd referenced Ray Davies of The Kinks, who summed up the issue 40 years ago: 'Before that they put up a bowling alley, on the site that used to be the local palais.' We are still knocking down our palais, just with better spreadsheets. The long-term fix is a revaluation process that stops treating cultural and community value as a rounding error. Burnham, as Mayor of Manchester, already tested policies on transport, licensing, and business rates that delivered for the local community.
With two years before the next full revaluation of business rates, there is an opportunity to get things right so that urgent patch-up relief is not needed every few years. Davyd noted that this action is both encouraging and frustrating, as it did not need to take years. It only required a government willing to pick something achievable and simply do it.
Davyd concluded that if this government continues to act on what it can fix now—on ownership, tax, and planning—people will start to feel a government that gets things done in their community for something they actually care about.
