Boomtown Festival Cancelled After No Government Covid Insurance Offered

Boomtown Festival has cancelled its 2021 event due to a lack of Covid-specific insurance policy from the UK government.

The festival will move to 10th-14th August 2022 instead.

In an official statement, Boomtown Festival said its organisers were “sorry to bring another round of heartbreaking news to you all and sadly it feels a bit like déjà vu, as almost exactly a year ago we had to break some identical bad news. Unfortunately, we will no longer be holding Boomtown Chapter One: The Gathering this year.”

Festival organisers said that they had done everything within their power to try to find a solution to the “mind-boggling conundrum” of putting on a safe and well-run event to the sheer scale, complexity and intricate nature of Boomtown this summer.

However, the time has simply run out for them to be able to proceed in a way that would live up to their high safety and production standards for the large scale event they had planned.

“With less than four months to go until the event, and after almost half a year of collective campaigning to the government, sadly Covid specific cancellation insurance for events simply does not exist at this point in time,” said Boomtown organisers.

“This means anyone putting on an event this year will be doing so without the safety net of insurance to cover them should Covid prevent them from going ahead in any capacity.

“For an independent event as large and complex as Boomtown, this means a huge gamble into an eight-figure sum to lose if we were to venture much further forward, and then not be able to go ahead due to Covid.”

Boomtown Festival had recently been awarded a generous grant from the Arts Council England, which threw them a vital and necessary lifeline, however the reality is it represents only a fraction of the costs (under 10%) involved in creating an event to the sheer scale and ambition of Boomtown, and only goes so far to plugging the deficit left from not being able to run the event, now for two years in a row, and most pressingly does not solve the problem of lack of insurance.

“We had planned Chapter One: The Gathering with our values front and centre and the safety and comfort at the top of the agenda for all in attendance, those living in the local area, as well as those working on the event. However, it does not feel that at this critical point in time, we have enough of an understanding of what the conditions will be in order for us to safely operate, or the time left to be able to implement it all to put on the show we know we were all waiting for this summer.”

All tickets for 2021 will automatically roll over to the 2022 event, and refunds will be available.

“We are so grateful to everyone who has kept their ticket with us over the past year, you really did save the festival, and will continue to do so if you are able to roll them over for another year. Head to the bottom of this page for more details.

“We are truly devastated to not be able to all come together to celebrate in the way we’d all like to this summer, and we know how hard this will be for the thousands of you who have supported us and kept the faith that we could collectively reunite in the beautiful fields this year.”

The resale for all refunded 2021 tickets will go ahead as planned on June 1.

Boomtown and many other UK festivals echo the sentiment over concerns over insurance, as does conductor, pianist and serial entrepreneur, Robert Emery, who created Get Musicians Working last year to help out the struggling industry:

“Insurance is not really talked about very often; producing a live event is a gamble,” he told Headliner. “The producers and promoters hire a venue, a stage, a band or whatever it is. There's got to be enough people buying enough tickets to go to the gig where they can recoup the money that they've spent, and hopefully make a profit. So it's a gambling man's business. The issue we've got at the moment is that a lot of the insurance companies won't insure a production against a loss due to Covid.

"The reality is if you've got a product lined up to go on a stage and then you're thrown into another lockdown, or if a member of the band or a member of the cast gets Covid and then everybody has to self isolate and you have to cancel that gig, or if the tier changes in the UK – all of a sudden you can't do the gig.

"A lot of the insurance companies are saying they won't insure against that, which puts the producer or the promoter in a massively difficult financial position. There are lots of people who are going bankrupt because of the fear of this.

“Some countries, like Germany are doing an incredibly important thing, where the government is giving some sort of backstop,” he points out. “They're saying, ‘if this happens, then we will step in and do this from an insurance point of view’. To my knowledge that has not yet been offered by the British government. I think if they are able to do that, then I suspect that we'll see the live events industry pick up fairly quickly.

"I would hope to start seeing some live stuff in the summer, but I fear if they don't do something like that, then it's going to be the summer of 2022 before we see live events happening again. It's just too big a financial risk, and quite frankly, I don't blame them.”