To say that Birmingham City Council is facing a number of challenges at the moment would be an understatement. A combination of savage cuts to their central funding, a failed IT system, and the equal pay case which is still yet to be sorted, has left them bankrupt. The bin strikes have left rubbish piling up in the streets. One would imagine that the council has rather more important things to be focusing on than ensuring the complete eradication of street performers from the city centre.

Yet this is what us buskers currently face. Three years ago, we campaigned without success against their plans to ban all busking within specific areas of the city, due to what the council described as a ‘high volume’ of complaints (though a freedom of information request later revealed that, in one of the two affected areas, 77 of the 80 recorded complaints had come from the same person). One of our arguments at the time was that this partial ban would lead to displacement of any issues rather than a resolution, and sure enough, they have now claimed that they are receiving more complaints across the rest of the city centre. The proposed solution? To ban all busking from the entirety of the city centre.

The scope of the Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) that they have proposed defies belief. Despite being assured during the introduction of PSPOs that they ‘would not be used against buskers where they are not causing anti-social behaviour’, the proposals in their current form would make it an offence for anyone to busk in the city centre, regardless of whether they themselves were causing any problems. And these proposals are likely to pass unless individual councillors take notice of what they will be voting for.

In my capacity as a director of Keep Streets Live, and a regular busker in Birmingham and its surrounding areas, I contacted every single councillor to attempt to facilitate dialogue and discussion. I have heard back from one of them, who simply said she would ‘look into it’. The council have not spoken personally with any busker, instead relying on the Environmental Health Department, who came up with the proposals in the first place. Their remit is to reduce noise complaints; there is no incentive for this department to protect artists or to promote cultural offerings.

In my discussions with this department, I put forward a number of possible compromises, such as including in the PSPO a clause stating that a busker can only be told to leave if they were behaving in an anti-social way, or to use existing powers available to enforcement officers. Their response was to claim that this was not viable because ‘it would require evidence’. Which, I pointed out, was kind of the point. I do not believe that new laws should be passed with the explicit intention of avoiding the need to gather evidence, and I believe that anyone, wherever they exist on the entire political spectrum, should agree with this basic principle.

I have busked in well over 500 towns and cities across the world. I can think of just a single major city in which busking is prohibited across the whole of the city centre. That city is Baku – the capital of Azerbaijan, a country with a lower Freedom Ranking Index than Russia, Rwanda or the UAE. 

If you live in Birmingham, please share this article with your local councillor in advance of the planned debate on the 22nd July. We cannot allow our wonderful, beautiful city to become one of the most authoritarian in Europe when it comes to busking.

* David Gray is a musician, actor and writer based in Birmingham. He is a a co-director of Keep Streets Live