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Culture Committee chair criticises government’s licensing review
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 29 July 2009
The chair of parliament’s culture select committee, John Whittingdale, has criticised the government for ignoring some of his key recommendations for reforming licensing rules.
As previously reported, the live music sector was recently disappointed when a government review of the 2003 Licensing Act failed to deal with a number of the issues the music industry had raised and rejected various proposals it had made, such as the introduction of a licence exemption for smaller venues and the scrapping of the controversial Form 696 used by London authorities when considering live event applications.
It was all the more disappointing because Whittingdale’s committee had backed the live industry’s proposals when it reviewed the impact the 2003 act had had on the live music community. According to Music Week, Whittingdale gave a hard hitting speech on the matter at the Musicians’ Union conference yesterday, calling the government’s response to licensing issues “utterly pathetic and hopeless”.
The Tory MP also spoke out on two of the other big policy issues affecting the music industry just now – the sound recording copyright term extension and the three-strikes debate, supporting the former and advocating the ‘graduated response’ system proposed by the record companies in the latter.
The viewpoints were welcomed by his audience of jobbing musicians, it seems, though interestingly the views might have got a less well reception had he been addressing that other body of musicians, the Featured Artist Coalition. As previously reported, while the MU and FAC are in agreement on licensing issues, the latter, while supporting copyright extension, isn’t so keen on the current extension proposals as approved by the MU, BPI and PPL (the FAC say they favour the labels too much), and on the file-sharing issue they oppose anything that might result in music fans losing their internet connections.
