Britain’s nightlife is a £66bn growth engine, so why won’t politicians treat it like one?

Britain has perfected a particular kind of political theatre over the decades, where a ministerial appearance at an industry summit and rhetoric about supporting workers is followed by a return to Westminster where the policies that are slowly strangling that sector remain intact.

Angela Rayner's appearance at the Liverpool Night Time Economy Summit is not, in itself, a problem. I welcome it. The problem is the gap between the register of that conversation and the policy decisions that determine whether a bar owner in Toxteth can afford to stay open past midnight or a music venue in Leeds can survive another round of business rates revaluation.

That gap isn't small, it's structural and it's been widening for years.

I saw this first-hand during my time at Defected Records as its Chief Business Officer.  We watched the pandemic hollow out the night-time workforce in real time.  A roll call of people we knew personally - sound engineers, lighting technicians, managers and venue staff - who had spent years building expertise in one of the most operationally complex and culturally vital industries in the country, suddenly found themselves displaced, with no system to support them.

So we built something ourselves, pivoting our livestream operation to employ as many of those displaced and furloughed workers as we could. If you lose these people,  you lose the knowledge, the networks, and the accumulated craft that makes a live cultural experience possible.

During that period we worked closely with the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) and its CEO Michael Kill, who has done more than almost anyone in this country to make the economic and human case for backing nightlife as a genuine driver of city-centre growth, employment and cultural identity.

I had the privilege of speaking at the NTIA's annual gatherings during those years, and what struck me every time was the dispiriting gap between what that community was articulating and what the policy response looked like.

The UK night-time economy is worth approximately £66 billion annually and employs over three million people, from door staff to promoters. These are not peripheral workers in peripheral industries; they're the connective tissue of British city life.

These are the places where incredible memories lasting our whole lives start; where we fall in love for the first time, meet our loved ones and where we discover music, genres and artists. And they are being governed by a system that treats them as a social amenity rather than an economic engine.

The mechanisms of this abandonment are boringly mundane, which is perhaps why they escape the attention they deserve.

Licensing regimes that vary so wildly between local authorities that two venues on opposite sides of a council boundary can operate under entirely different conditions.

Policing gaps that leave venues managing public safety functions, with venues getting the blame if something goes wrong.

London made an effort to address some of this with the introduction of a Night Tube and a Night Czar in 2016. This worked to increase footfall, boost employment and support venue survival. The lesson was clear. Yet this model was never replicated anywhere else in the country.

Regional cities, such as Manchester (birthplace of New Order, Oasis, the Stone Roses) Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol and Sheffield, are hot beds of culture. They shape Britain's cultural identity in ways that rarely translate into the policy support they need.

We celebrate the music that came out of these places but we don’t fund the infrastructure that makes it possible for the next generation of that music to emerge. The venues close and the workers scatter.

A serious night-time strategy requires a reformed business rates system with a specific carve-out for small and mid-sized cultural venues. It needs national licensing standards with a clear, fast pathway for new operators and transport investment that connects the ambition of a 24-hour city to the physical reality of getting a 3am worker home safely.

Some politicians, Angela Rayner for example, genuinely do care about nightlife. The tragedy is that caring about it as a cultural symbol and caring about it as an economic system require two very different kinds of support. Britain has only ever focused on the former.

We cannot have truly productive, genuinely liveable cities while starving the economies that keep them alive after dark.

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James Kirkham is the Founder of ICONIC

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