hello lambeth green fair peeps,
it's way off my patch, but if you need advice, copies of event manuals, or support from newcastle community green festival, a free environmental festival we've run for 12 years that last year had 12,000 people attend in an unfenced city centre park that's smaller than brockwell let me know.
If this is an edict coming down from parks dept it sounds to me like they're one of the councils that's got their knickers in a twist about the new licencing act. Essentially as it's been explained to us, when the new act is applied to council owned land a representative of the council needs to be licensee for the event, rather than the person actually running the festival being licensee.
This has caused chaos in council across the country as it basically means the parks departments are now being pressured to become the licensees for all events in their parks, with individual parks managers being liable for any problems, whereas in the past the event manager would be the licensee. This would explain why it is the parks dept that is insisting on events being fenced, basically they're playing it safe because it's now their necks on the line, and they ain't necessarily trained in event management.
The way newcastle council is handling it is to licence all parks permanently for the biggest event they can envisage holding in each park, they are then basically drawing up contracts with the same terms and conditions as the old licences would have had so essentially responsiblity is returned to the event organisers.
The guidance on this has by all accounts been utterly shit from government, with each council left to make it up as they go along. Essentially we had our first safety advisory group meeting a month ago & were told that the licensing departement still weren't clear themselves about how the new process was supposed to work, but that we'd definately get a licence some how... so if this is a new event I can understand why you might be having trouble.
the good thing is that once the licence has gone through the site is permanently licenced as long as you have council and police permission, the bad news is that if they fuck up on the licencing conditions in the first place they could be stuck with them for a long time... as may have happened with the all events needing to be fenced thing.
I very much doubt the local council are entirely to blame here, though they obviously could have sorted it out better, it's central government that fucked it up and local government who're trying to pick up the pieces... try to develop a relationship with the park manager, be sympathetic, win them round, make them trust you, maybe even run an event for less than 2000 with no fences this year to build up trust for next year... basically some park manager is now licensee for your event, so if you fuck up it could be him that ends up in court for it, so he needs to be pretty confident in you before he / she is going to put hisher neck on the line for you.
what this all basically means is that event organisers will have to work much more closely with the council and police in the planning of the event than in the past. Newcastle started this process 4 years ago, and we basically have to produce a 70 page event manual, then have multiple meetings with council, police, fire, st johns, ambulance, health and hygiene etc. to go through everything with a fine tooth combe until the safety advisory group eventually signs the event manual off... only then would we actually go for a licence (or as is the case now, be granted a licence automatically). This process was a nightmare the first year we did it, now it's dead relaxed and we've had no problems at all for ages...
shit it's 5am and I got my own fest to organise in 5 weeks
good luck
email me at
[email protected] if you need anything.
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right now ...
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