Events & The Euro Factor

As Clegg and Farage do battle over the pros and cons of being a part of Europe, let’s put the big issues aside for a moment and take a brief look at how membership of the EU impacts upon the events industry here in the UK.

My experience of the ‘Euro Factor’ is limited to two specific areas of legislation:

Procurement and Contract Tenders
Health and Safety

Procurement

As a result of a lot of disgruntlement within the industry press about the process of tendering and all its foibles, Stand Out magazine admirably took it upon themselves to bring together industry representatives in a bid to identify how to improve things.

The meeting, chaired by Nick de Bois, MP, at the House of Commons, was fruitful inasmuch as demonstrable evidence was presented by Sally Collier, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer for the Government, that many issues are clearly being addressed.

There was however an underlying acceptance of the fact that “we have to work within the limitations and parameters of European legislation”, and as things currently stand, any public contract whose value exceeds the £111,676 threshold (in the case of services), falls into that category. That means that tenders need to be published in the Official Journal of the European Union and a complex bureaucratic process ensues.

Anyone in the events business will know that a £112k budget doesn’t buy you an Olympic sized event. It’s probably a standard cost for say a two-day public event on a nice site, with good production values (stage, screen, marquees, site dressing, power, security and all requisite ancillary services), interesting content and … there’s your £112k gone.

What this means is that a London Borough, for example, putting on its flagship event of the year, may well have to advertise in the OJEU and potentially, depending on how the tender specification is written, could be ‘forced’ into giving the contract to a Hungarian production company. While I have nothing against Hungarians (I am one), I do find that situation rather odd.

Of course in reality this rarely, if ever, happens, as there are plenty of clever people in procurement who craft their tender specifications in such a way that they can then justify giving the contract to one of the players that they had initially wanted. I suppose it’s much like clever accountants working out how to legally circumvent tax legislation and secure the most tax-efficient solutions for their clients.

And so in this regard – that of procurement – EU legislation is indeed having a very tangible effect on our industry.

Health & Safety

To be honest, I don’t really know what impact Europe has actually had on specific, nitty-gritty H&S issues.

What I do know is that I frequently hear industry people sucking their teeth before launching into a moan about the fact that we can’t do this or that anymore … the inherent assumption being that European legislation has kyboshed it.

It could be sparkies talking about what cables they can or can’t use, food-stall marketers talking about what now constitutes a proper sausage or photographers talking about the nightmare of photo release forms. Rightly or wrongly, the perception is that Europe is to blame.

I eagerly await information that any reader might send in to enlighten me here, but I suspect that these issues are not specifically Europe related. It is probably just a consequence of our ever-increasingly litigious society – something that ironically has emanated from the other side of the Atlantic as opposed to the other side of the English Channel.

And so in this instance, unchaining ourselves from Europe is highly unlikely to lead to any kind of abatement of seemingly unnecessary H&S rules and regulations.

KP Blogger – Mish Toszeghi

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