Music licensing red tape 'should be relaxed'

Music licensing legislation should be relaxed for pubs and smaller venues, a parliamentary report has said.

A review of the 2003 Licensing Act, which came into force in 2005, recommends that venues with a capacity of 200 or fewer should be exempt from needing a live music licence.

It also advises the reintroduction of the 'two-in-a-bar' exemption - which allowed venues of any size to host a performance by one or two acoustic musicians without the need for a licence - and suggests that the number of Temporary Event Notices a pub can apply for each year should be increased from 12 to 15.

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which commissioned the report, expressed concern at "the linkage of live music and public order issues" in the 2003 legislation, and said that music should not be automatically treated as a "disruptive activity, which will inevitably lead to nuisance and disorder".

It called on the Government to scrap the Promotion & Event Assessment Form (Form 696), which requires venues in London to provide details of music genre and target audience 14 days prior to an event, for security reasons. The committee said that this went "way beyond the provisions of the Act".

Committee chairman John Whittingdale concluded: "Our report calls on the Government to relax restrictions in this area, which in some cases are unnecessarily draconian, and in others simply absurd."