Festival Insights NEWS: Music Venue Trust urges enforced temporary closure of music venues

UK: The Music Venue Trust has penned an open letter to Boris Johnson and launched a petition that both demand the temporary closure of grassroots music venues. The organisation claims that failing to do so will result in the ‘permanent closure and loss of hundreds’ of venues throughout the UK.

The letter asserts that Johnson has ‘created the conditions where these venues are forced to remain open while simultaneously requesting that the public do not go to them’, and goes on to state that: ‘This is not a policy at all. If Public Health demands that these venues should not be used, Public Health demands that the government should act to close them. You cannot ask Grassroots Music Venues and the thousands of people who work in them to pay the cost of a Public Health policy decision that the government needs to take.’

Prior to Johnson’s statement on the matter, Music Venue…