Park ‘secretly helped’ music festival expand
NATIONAL Park officials have been accused of secretly helping through what campaigners claim is an environmentally damaging expansion of a summer music festival on the South Downs.
Planning officers at South Downs National Park Authority offered behind-thescenes support to the site owners of Boomtown, which saw four drug-related deaths from 2011 to 2016.
The tactics suggested in emails seen by The Sunday Telegraph seemingly resulted in permission for an extra 400 attendees, a move likely to yield some £80,000 in additional revenue.
The park authority denies any wrongdoing and says its officers were trying to rectify their own bureaucratic mistake regarding numbers.
Staged around a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) near Winchester, the festival will this year welcome up to 76,999 people.
Opponents blame the dramatic expansion since 2009 on an “ideological” drive to attract external visitors to the national park at all costs, ignoring the fact that they party behind a 10ft wall rather than engaging with the countryside.
The area around Cheesefoot Head is renowned as one of the finest lowland vistas in the UK, comprising three “bowl barrow” ancient burial sites.
The row in Hampshire follows controversy in the Lake District over plans to attract more “diverse” visitors, including by laying down 4x4 trails and erecting zip-wires.
It has also emerged that environmental “evidence” upon which the park authority granted permission for the expansion applied to a tiny proportion of the site.
The five-day festival, which describes itself as a “city”, covers approximately 503 hectares, but the environmental assessment only covered the SSSI within it, which is about 2.5 per cent of the site.
Victor Ient, of Friends of the South Downs, which opposes the expansion, said: “We are surprised the exchange of information about a potential further application should have been part of a formal pre-application process.”
A spokesman for the authority said: “National planning policy requires that planning officers should work positively with any and every planning applicant. This applies across the entire country.”
Last year Boomtown’s headline acts included The Streets and Prophets of Rage. In 2016 80 cars were destroyed in a fire started by a discarded cigarette.