Agent of Change: How a Planning Clause Became a Gig-Saving Anthem

What if we stopped blaming venues for being noisy and started planning like adults?

Every so often, the music industry likes to offer up a series of complicated socio-economic drivers behind the challenges faced by the grassroots live sector. These range from ‘the enemy is apathy’ through to a navel gazing consideration of the decline in social drinking. But far too often the challenge is much simpler than that for your local grassroots music venue - the enemy is a luxury flat built next door by a developer who apparently thinks a ‘soundcheck’ is a type of handshake.

This is where Agent of Change comes in.

Not a Marvel spin-off. Not a lost B-side from Muse. And definitely not some new algorithm from a tech platform that swears that for only £14.99 a month all your events will be full.

Agent of Change is a planning principle, three simple words that should be saving hundreds of grassroots music venues from death by noise complaint. And this week, after more than a decade of polite suggestions, unanswered petitions, and endless policy panels, Dame Caroline Dinenage MP has tabled an amendment that could finally (FINALLY) make it law.

Real law. The kind you can quote to a developer with a simple link and the polite suggestion to either do the right thing or sling their hook. The kind that gets printed in bold on planning decisions. The kind that might just stop venues being shut down for doing the thing they exist to do.

Let’s back up a bit.

Venues across the UK have been closing for literally decades because someone wanted to build housing in a “vibrant urban area” and then discovered that music isn’t just a playlist - it’s actual sound, made by people, sometimes at night. Under the current system, based on centuries old planning law in turn based on the assumption of the right to the ‘quiet enjoyment of your home’, the venue gets blamed when new residents of inadequately built flats and houses can hear and feel the noise. Not the developer. Not the council. Not the buyer who moved next to a bassline and then called it anti-social behaviour.

Agent of Change is incredibly simple; it flips the logic. It says if you change the status quo, you’re responsible for dealing with the consequences.

So if you build a new residential block next to a venue, you have to make sure your walls are thick enough. If you move in, you need to be told what you’re moving next to. If you profit from proximity to culture, you can’t turn around and kill it.

This isn’t theoretical. In case after case, developers have submitted noise impact assessments that failed to mention the venue next door. In over a third of MVT’s emergency support cases related to planning, the venue wasn’t even named in the documentation. Invisible to the people making decisions - until the complaints start.

Music Venue Trust has been shouting about this since 2014. We’ve dragged it through planning policy reviews, local authority workshops, cross-party committees and more than a few sleepless nights. The National Planning Policy Framework gave it a hefty nod in 2017, and various local authorities like London, Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, Brighton and Bristol also tipped their hats at it with a commitment to take it on board when making decisions. But all of that was guidance - not legislation, except in Scotland which got this right and made it law in 2019.

Guidance, as anyone in the planning world knows, is what you take on board, run some maths on, and work out a really good reason why it shouldn’t apply.

That’s why this amendment is the moment. Dame Caroline’s proposed change to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill puts Agent of Change into primary legislation. That means it’s not optional. Local authorities would have to enforce it. Not “consider” it. Not “bear it in mind.” Not “refer to footnote six.” Enforce it. Developers wouldn’t be able to submit applications without referencing it.

It means venues would no longer need to fight every single development individually. It means councils would have clarity. It means developers would be held to account before they submit the kind of half-baked plans that assume a techno night ends at 8pm.

And most importantly, as we have repeatedly told national government, it’s good for residents and, wait for it, would actually speed up the planning application process.

Nobody wants to move into a flat that shakes unexpectedly on a Thursday. Nobody wants to raise kids in a space where bedtime coincides with load-in. And nobody wants to go through the stress of legal battles, formal complaints, or nightly headaches when it could have all been fixed with proper insulation, adequate planning, and a clear brochure.

The current guidance results in an almost endless back and forth between MVT, the venue, the developer and the local authority while we fight it out over whether an adequate noise assessment was delivered by planting a laptop and a microphone fifty feet in the wrong direction between the hours of 7am and 9am on a Tuesday morning. Trust me on this; the average first planning application to build next to a music venue reads like something that Douglas Adams rejected from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for being too comical and unbelievable.

Agent of Change is about honesty. It’s about planning with eyes open. It’s about protecting the cultural spaces that make places worth living in by building accommodation next to them that is suitable to live in.

This isn’t a fight between housing and culture. It’s about making sure the two can coexist. There isn’t a music venue in the land that wouldn’t clap their hands with glee and do a little victory dance at the thought of 2000 new student flats being built next door if they were confident that the new accommodation wouldn’t result in noise complaints.

So why has it taken so long?

Because music isn’t listed. Because planning frameworks favour the new over the existing. Because too often the venues that gave us Adele and IDLES and Skepta and Wet Leg don’t have a commemorative plaque - they have a short term lease, a noise limit, and a fed up Environmental Health Officer who doesn’t get paid overtime for coming out at 1am. Our planning system still treats culture as decoration, not infrastructure.

The good news is that this is changing. Slowly. Systematically. Through years of fan and venue activism, and politicians who finally understand that the UK’s £525 million grassroots music economy is not a side hustle - it’s the vital front line of research and development.

Dame Caroline’s amendment is the final step. The moment the theory becomes practice. The bit where we stop asking politely and start drawing up building regs. It’s the first time we have ever managed to get it to the point of being UK law that culture must be protected, and we must make it the last time we need to do it. Everyone needs to push their MP to support this amendment and make it happen. Agent of Change isn’t a revolution. It’s common sense finally getting legal enforcement.

Write to your MP. Ask them to back the amendment. If you live in a place with venues and planning applications - which is basically everywhere - this is our opportunity to finally end this part of the debate about the future for grassroots music venues with a robust and enforceable legal position. And that legal position is simply the common sense almost everyone agrees should already be happening.