Member

The noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, said that the Bill should reassure the public that they will be safe. My concern is that venues and those who organise events might well feel that they are safe if they follow procedures but that can mean, ironically, that a procedural, technocratic approach to safety is deployed. Very large venues could simply go through the motions—watch their back, jump through hoops and tick boxes—while smaller venues would need to prove they were doing the right thing, but, ironically, the Bill puts in place a system where people do not need to think but simply follow the rules. Key to any approach to dealing with danger or safety issues is not simply to follow but to think about the rules. Taking an evidence-based approach, in which people would call for an exemption to show that their event would be detrimentally impacted or they could consider the evidence provided by the various threat levels, would at least ensure that the system was not being used in a technocratic and unhelpful way.