Birmingham Council is planning a Public Spaces Protection Order that will prohibit people from ‘using amplification equipment, musical instruments or other items used as musical instruments’ in the city centre. This will include ‘Noise associated with busking; street entertaining, street preaching and public speaking’.
Here is a guest blog post by David Fisher, busker and director of Keep Streets Live.
When Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs) were introduced in 2014, they came with assurances that they should not be used against buskers who were not causing anti-social behaviour. At the time, buskers were sceptical about whether this advice would be always followed.
The truth has been even worse. Keep Streets Live has documented 25 councils that use PSPOs to restrict busking, and now Birmingham has announced that it is going to ban all busking in the city centre.
Birmingham first proposed a ban on busking back in 2021, in two of the most profitable areas of the city centre. A Freedom of Information request filed by a group of buskers showed that, of the 80 complaints made against buskers in one of these areas, all but 3 were made by the same person. In the council’s view, this was irrelevant – they claimed that the mere fact that complaints had been made had forced them to act. A number of alternative solutions for dealing with genuine issues were put forward and rejected. One of the council’s reasons why alternative approaches wouldn’t work was because they ‘would require us to have evidence’ before restricting a busker.
Now, Birmingham Council is proposing to ban all use of musical instruments across the entire city centre. While this is currently in consultation, the perception among buskers locally is that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. There are no legal means to force the council into a rethink, even if the consultation results in overwhelming opposition to the plans.
For context, in order to challenge a PSPO, it is necessary to mount a High Court challenge, the cost of which is generally five or six figures. Once a PSPO has been introduced, if you are penalised it is not a valid legal defence to argue that the PSPO is invalid or unreasonable. It is also not possible to appeal against an individual fine. In order to challenge a fixed penalty notice, you must refuse to pay, which leaves you liable for criminal prosecution. If you lose your case, you are then responsible for not just your own legal costs and a fine of up to £1000, but all the council’s legal costs as well.
Meanwhile, the situation for buskers in London continues to deteriorate. A failed licensing system in Westminster has led to a legal challenge by Global Radio – ironically a radio station that claims to promote musicians – that has forced the council to ban buskers from the historically significant area of Leicester Square.
Buskers are facing numerous challenges in the present climate, including the accelerating sell-off of public land (there are now some urban areas that no longer have any publicly owned space in their town centres), and the declining use of cash. If councils such as Birmingham are not brought to heel in their misuse of PSPOs, we will continue to see buskers squeezed out of areas in which they have been performing for centuries, no doubt to be replaced by soulless pre-recorded music piped through speakers.
If PSPOs are to remain part of our legislature, they require a full review of their misuse, and a complete overhaul in the way that they are implemented. This includes:
- A ban on financial incentives being given to companies who issue fines (at present, over three quarters of fines issued are given by private companies who take a percentage of the fine);
- An affordable and accessible avenue for PSPOs to be challenged at the implementation stage on the basis that they do not follow government statutory guidance;
- The opportunity to appeal fines where they are given to people who were not behaving anti-socially.