'You Talk and Talk. Do Nothing.'

The 2025 Spending Review offered nothing for live music at the grassroots - and we’ve heard that song too many times.

The Chancellor’s Spending Review landed this week and, once again, we went through it line by line looking for anything - anything at all - that recognised the scale of the crisis in grassroots music venues or the potential for the government to actually do something useful about it.

Be prepared to be shocked to your very core gentle readers: There was nothing.

Plenty of talk, as usual, about creativity, community, regeneration, opportunity. Culture as a tool for leveling up, culture for young people, culture as a driver of local pride. But absolutely no mention of the part of culture that creates new music, gives artists their first shows, employs tens of thousands of people, underpins the touring infrastructure, or delivers night-time economies to communities around the country. No acknowledgement of the role grassroots music venues play, and no funding, no programmes, no strategy that we can access or be part of. Watch Rachel Reeves’ speech yourself if you are really at a loose end. In 45 minutes she mentioned culture once and music once.

It is not just that the review didn’t give us what we need. It actively pretends we don’t exist.

The government could have chosen this moment to say: here is a sector that produces over £500 million in direct economic activity, that creates jobs in every region, that brings people into town centres, that builds the talent pipeline for an industry worth over £6 billion, and that does all of that while making almost no profit at all. The Review could have acknowledged that the grassroots sector subsidises new music at a loss to the tune of £116 million a year. - that’s not hyperbole, that’s actual cash flow. But the review didn’t mention it. And it certainly didn’t seek to help fix it.

They could have backed the investment case we put forward earlier this year. We laid it out. Just £60 million a year would protect venues, grow jobs, stimulate local economies, deliver regeneration, secure the talent pipeline, and expand access. In case that sounds like a lot, it’s not a radical figure at all. In Government terms, it buys you one incredibly badly thought out, and hideously failed, Festival of Brexit. Or you can multiple it by ten and treat yourself to one whole protected steel works.

Maybe we are barking up the wrong tree because government finances are still tight - although I’m not sure you would know that listening to this spending review. Maybe instead of asking for the investment that is desperately needed we should focus instead on what government could do to take its foot off off the heads of a sector that is not waving, it’s drowning? You know, by not having the highest rate of VAT on gig tickets anywhere in the world. Or not having the highest rate of premises taxes anywhere in Europe. Weirdly, this Spending Review didn’t address either of those two issues either, nor roll back the £7 million in additional Business Rates taxation in 2025/26, or seek to mitigate the additional £15 million in NI Contribution taxes in 2025/26.

We didn’t get investment, and we didn’t get anything on addressing a frankly insane level of taxation on the sector that’s actually got worse since April. Instead we got gestures. Place-based investment routed through local authority pipelines that we know from long experience grassroots music venues can't get near. General cultural funding that never trickles down, being absorbed seamlessly into the 82% of public funding for music that is eaten up by classical and opera.

What we also got was a continued squeeze on departmental budgets that raises serious questions about how any of these lofty ambitions are going to be delivered. The actual DCMS budget was reduced, by 1.4% this time time following a 6.2% reduction last time. Subsequent documents suggested that there is a promise to significantly increase funding for the creative industries as one of the government's eight priority growth-driving sectors. This new funding, they say, will support innovation, regional growth and ensure the UK's creative industries remain renowned across the world. If it actually comes into existence it will be all about prioritising how it is spent; governments, of every level and every shade of politics, tend to think announcing a one-off investment into a new £500 million museum is the same as getting to grips with the crisis facing access to culture in our local communities. We will be watching, and we’ll be the first to say if the new priorities include grassroots music.

But even then let’s not pretend this is something it wasn’t. This review was a chance to make a clear, direct intervention in a sector that needs it. They didn’t take it.

What’s most frustrating is that they know. Ministers know. The Select Committee report in 2024 year laid it all out. Cross-party MPs agreed. The evidence was undeniable. The Minister turned up in May 2025 and he agreed the fuck out of it. Everyone is nodding at all the right moments. Everyone is smiling in all the photos. But this review didn’t even repeat the promises, let alone fund them.

Meanwhile, venues are still closing. Artists still can’t tour. Promoters are working for nothing. The live music map is shrinking. And audiences are watching it all disappear, one postcode at a time. Leicester, Hull, Swansea, Bath, Aberdeen - whole towns and cities falling off the grassroots touring circuit. We’ve been here before. Ask anyone who played in Bath Moles or slogged through a wet Tuesday in 2011 supporting a band you’ve never heard of in a venue that’s now a Tesco. They’ll tell you that this is what it looks like when infrastructure collapses. And they’ll tell you how long it is going to take to build it back again.

Culture is always an after-thought for UK Governments. We have the lowest spend per head of any country in Europe on culture and the gap in investment between us and our musical competitors is getting bigger and bigger every year. If you want to see exactly how far adrift we are getting in terms of our commitment to culture, creativity and the arts in general, Campaign for the Arts did an excellent piece of work breaking down the data on this spending review. That work demonstrates one clear fact that sits, uncontestable, at the heart of this conversation: Since Spending Reviews were introduced, this Government is the first to make consecutive cuts to Culture, Media & Sport whilst growing spending overall.

For too long and far too often, Creative Industries is seen as a tax revenue generator to be milked dry and not an opportunity for growth, investment, jobs, community cohesion, well-being. So no, we’re not surprised by this latest Spending Review. But we are getting increasingly frustrated and angry by the approach successive UK governments have taken.

This Spending Review is yet another missed opportunity to change that approach. And because we’ve done everything we were asked to do. We made the economic case. We showed the job creation potential. We set out the multiplier. We explained the regeneration angle, the tourism angle, the export angle, the skills pipeline, the community impact, the well-being data. It’s all there, in the reports they read and the briefings they nod along to. But when it came time to act, they passed. Again.

So now we turn our attention to what’s next. Sir Chris Bryant says he has a 10-point plan for music on the way. By the end of June we are promised a Creative Industries Sector Plan and the Industrial Strategy White Paper. All of these will be key moments to demonstrate the government's commitment and ambition to support the grassroots sector in the decade to come. We’re expecting, maybe stupidly, all of them to show that somebody in Parliament is still listening. We know what change looks like and how to deliver it - we just need government to get out of the habit of talking a good game and start putting actual resource into the hands of the people making it happen.

Until then, grassroots music venues will keep doing what we always do. Running venues. Supporting artists. Showing up, turning the lights on, rigging the stage, and paying the PRS fee that exceeds the amount we made on the door. And we’ll keep reminding people that the problem being experienced at the grassroots level isn’t the music, the venues, the artists, the promoters, the crew or the fans. The problem is really, really, REALLY bad political choices.

The UK Grassroots Music Sector isn’t a vibe. It’s a Research and Development powerhouse that the rest of the world is envious of, actively looking to replicate, and then hoping they will surpass. And other governments of other countries are already actively doing it using exactly the sort of structured and sensible long term approach that our own government is simply ignoring. Some of the cleverest ones are, genuinely, taking the report from the UK CMS Select Committee and adapting it for their own markets. While we can’t even get out of the starting blocks, they are halfway down the track.

We’re not here for their warm words. We’re here for action. Maybe we could think about having that action before the next generation of Joe Strummers is forced to spend their lives in hock to TikTok because there’s nowhere left to plug in an amp.

This town is coming like a Ghost Town. There you go. It’s only 10am on a Sunday and you’ve already had The Specials quoted at you twice.

And there’s really no good reason at all why I should need to be doing that.