Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether he has made an assessment of the effect on Gross Value Added in the event that festivals and other mass participation events cannot take place in summer 2021 due to the covid-19 outbreak.

We appreciate the important role that the festival sector plays in the UK’s economy, and that the Covid-19 pandemic presents a significant challenge to this sector. We have been working closely with the festival sector to understand the challenges it faces and to keep the situation under review.

The festival sector has estimated the total GVA for festivals to the UK economy is £1.76bn. The industry has also estimated that widespread cancellation of festivals in the summer could lead to a drop in GVA of £1bn (between June and August 2021).