WOMAD festival director Chris Smith has told Access that the event will be cancelled today, 28 June, unless the Government issues guidelines as to how mass events will be required to run following the reopening on 19 July.

The 40,000-capacity world music festival is scheduled to take place on 22-25 July at Charlton Park in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, with a culturally diverse line-up of talent including Anoushka Shankar, Jordan Rakei, Nitin Sawhney and The Comet Is Coming.

Smith said, “We will have no choice other than to cancel on Monday if there isn’t either the guidance information available from the Government or indication they will underwrite. No matter what, we will carry on fighting for the rest of the industry but it will be too late for us because on Monday we will have to splash out £1.5m or we are going to lose most of our artists and contractors, as many of them are saying they can’t wait any longer.

“I think there is a strategic objective in preventing our industry from working this summer, I don’t know the purpose of the strategy, but I believe it’s a conscious decision.”

“It is out of our hands because we can’t take the risk. As Peter [Gabriel] has said, we either take the risk this year and potentially go out of business or we don’t run it this year and live to fight another day.”

Smith said the festival has applied to be part of the ongoing Events Research Programme that involves forthcoming events including Tramlines, Wimbledon Championships, the Formula 1 British Grand Prix at Silverstone and UEFA Euro 2020 at Wembley Stadium.

“[Government] hasn’t had the curtesy to respond,” he said. “We also spoke to our Public Health contact, who was as helpful as she could be but she couldn’t be helpful at all because clearly the Government don’t talk to Public Health either.

“It’s not just the finances, as Kendall [Calling] rightly pointed out; we haven’t been provided Government guidance on what the required Covid-safe event mitigation measures will be. So, on 19 July, just 72 hours before our event is due to start, we could be told that we have to do a whole bunch of things that we either can’t afford to do or can’t get equipment for. [Government] has no respect for festival planning cycles and they have no understanding of what is involved in what we do despite all the information being available; everyone’s been saying it in public, it’s been across the media. They can only be choosing to ignore it, and that has to be a decision not an accident.

“I think there is a strategic objective in preventing our industry from working this summer, I don’t know the purpose of the strategy, but I believe it’s a conscious decision. Government’s decision not to share guidance information is strategic. They have accountability, an obligation to explain that decision.

“We are furious and will continue to express that. We are on the front line but it is the people behind us that will get hit even harder than we are –the contractors, the staff, the artists”