"The cancellation of Boomtown Fair is devastating but not surprising, and further festival cancellations will follow. AIF has been warning and providing evidence to the Government for over six months on the urgent need for intervention on insurance. It is an enormous risk for any independent festival to commit to upfront, non-refundable costs and very difficult to plan with confidence in the absence of insurance. The average cost of staging an independent festival is over £6m.

"A recent AIF member survey revealed that 92.5% of respondents do not plan on staging their events without some form of Government-backed insurance or indemnity scheme, with the measure being described as vital not optional. Considering the lengthy planning cycle of festivals, it is difficult to think anything other than we are being timed out for the summer.

"Governments across the rest of Europe have already acted to support festivals, sharing the risk with organisers so that they may reopen safely. If this Government doesn't intervene in some way on insurance and back its own roadmap, I'm afraid that, despite the rhetoric, it won't be a great British summer for events - it will be an extremely selective one despite the clear demand and huge amount of customer confidence that the roadmap has injected."