Party Fears Two

Arts Council England has just proven, with receipts, that cultural tax relief works. You'll never guess who didn't get an invitation.

In February 2026, Arts Council England published a review of cultural tax reliefs, commissioned from Nordicity, Ipsos, and Saffery. It is, by any measure, an impressive document. Not because it breaks new ground, exactly, but because it says the quiet part loud, with enough footnotes to make it undeniable. Theatre Tax Relief, Orchestra Tax Relief, and Museums and Galleries Exhibition Tax Relief have, since their introduction between 2014 and 2017, delivered nearly £1 billion in financial support to the sectors they cover. Organisations claiming them earn 37% more income annually than those that don’t. They tour more, produce more, employ more people, and contribute more to the economy. The enhanced pandemic-era rates were kept permanently from April 2025, now sitting at the highest levels of their kind anywhere in the world.

No messing about. Tax relief targeted at cultural organisations works. Confirmed. Move on. Next question.

The review is careful to frame itself as an evaluation of existing reliefs, not a blueprint for extending them. But it cannot help making the argument, methodically and without meaning to, for a form of support it doesn’t actually quite go so far as to recommend. Because what the review demonstrates is not just that these specific reliefs have been useful. It demonstrates why this type of intervention works at all. Organisations that receive structural fiscal support plan differently. They take risks they wouldn’t otherwise take. They invest in touring, in new productions, in capacity. The support doesn’t just keep them alive; it makes them more ambitious. That is a different thing from a grant. A grant keeps the lights on for another year. A tax relief changes how you think about what’s possible.

Every word of that applies, with a precision that, frankly, veers towards the satirical by its omission, to grassroots music venues.

In 2025, 801 grassroots music venues operated across the UK. They staged 174,552 live events, welcomed 21.6 million audience visits, employed 24,742 people and contributed £558.5 million to the UK economy. More than half, 53.8%, made no profit. The average venue lost £95,685 on live music across the year and carried on regardless, subsidising that gap through drinks and the quiet conviction that keeping the room open matters. Business rates changes and National Insurance increases landed on that sector in a single year and employment fell by nearly 20%. Not over a decade. In twelve months.

You will be completely stunned, shocked, and surprised to learn that no cultural tax relief exists for any of this.

The venues where every significant British artist of the last sixty years learned their trade, where the touring circuit that feeds the arenas and the festivals originates, where 25 million people in 175 towns and cities have lost access to regular professional touring shows because the economics of small rooms have been allowed to collapse without any structural intervention… none of it qualifies. The tax system, as it stands, recognises a museum mounting six exhibitions a year as a cultural institution deserving a tax incentive and relief package that delivers real fiscal support. It does not extend the same recognition to the room in your town where the next Sam Fender is currently playing to fourteen people and a sound engineer who is also the bar manager.

The ACE review’s own authors know this. On page 67, in the recommendations section, they identify the subsectors not covered by existing provision and propose that government give consideration to new tax reliefs for each of them. They name three: Dance, Literature and Publishing, and Grassroots and Popular Music. This is not buried in an appendix, nor hedged as an area for further research. It is listed, quite plainly, in the body of the recommendations, by the people commissioned to tell the government how cultural tax relief should develop. I’m sure regular readers of these columns will forgive me if I am wearing my flashing neon t-shirt with ‘I F***ing Told You So’ written on it, but I guess it’s nice that the argument that the only reason tax relief for GMVs has not happened was because nobody knew about this opportunity has just been giving a thorough kicking in the mosh pit.

We should not be shy and acknowledging an uncomfortable truth here: The current limits of cultural tax relief is not an accident of history. It is a choice, made and remade each year, to define “culture” in a way that happens to exclude the part of it that is most financially precarious and most consequential for the future of our reputation around the world as a leading cultural force. And if you don’t believe me or think I am exaggerating this point to be contentious, I invite you to read the terms of the Orchestra Tax Relief, which appears to have been written by someone with the firm conviction that all good music came to an end with the death of Mozart in 1791. We’ll have none of that noisy, modern, long haired, ‘amplified’ music round these parts.

The ACE review helpfully makes the case for its own recommendation without quite realising it. It models what would happen if Theatre Tax Relief were extended to include audience outreach and education: an additional £326 million in GVA, 3,600 new full-time jobs, £4.50 returned for every £1 invested. The logic of that modelling does not stop at the edge of a theatre’s balance sheet. It applies wherever you have cultural organisations operating on thin margins, producing public good, and lacking the fiscal architecture to plan with any confidence.

What would a Tax Relief for Grassroots Music Venues look like? Good news. The model already exists and the mechanism to do it is already understood. The evidence base, compiled by MVT across twelve years of annual reporting, is arguably stronger than anything that existed when Theatre Tax Relief was introduced in 2014. The question is not whether it would work, because the review just answered that. And the question is not whether it would work for Grassroots and Popular Music, the review already answered that too. The question is whether the government is willing to extend to the foundations of modern British music the same recognition it has already extended to the more formally constituted, historically accepted, parts of Britain’s rich cultural tapestry.

There are 801 venues still operating. For many years now we have witnessed venues close every year without consolidated government intervention through the tax system. The fiscal architecture that could change the conditions in which those venues operate does not require new thinking. It requires the decision to apply existing thinking to the one part of the cultural sector that needs it most and has waited longest.

The tax relief party has been going for over a decade. The invitation for Grassroots Music Venues to join in is long overdue.