Member

As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, this is a critical and urgent issue for many organisations and venues which are part of our vital cultural infrastructure. This is about not just grass-roots music venues but recording studios and, as we heard, artists’ studios as well. Many of these venues, which have just about managed to weather the combined storms of the Covid pandemic, rising global energy costs, inflation, the additional costs of employment through the changes that the Government have made to national insurance contributions and more, are now struggling, as the noble Lord said, to work out how they will balance their books for the forthcoming financial year. Grass-roots music venues are a sector in which more than half the businesses that operate them did not make a profit in the last year. They see themselves, quite rightly, as the loss-leading R&D hubs of our creative industries. If we were to lose the work that they do, the Exchequer, and all of us, will pay a very great price.