Protest at running of loss-making festival
The future of a popular community folk festival in Northamptonshire has been thrown into doubt over allegations of mismanagement by "over-enthusiastic amateurs".
Spratton Folk Festival is due to take place in July and several top bands have already been booked for the event, which attracted more than 3,000 people last year.
But at a heated parish council meeting on Tuesday, a petition signed by more than 200 protesters was handed over demanding the organisers address major concerns over how the festival was run.
Among the litany of alleged mistakes made by the co-ordinators was running a bar without till rolls, so there was no way of knowing how much money visitors were spending on alcohol.
Grants from the Arts Council and National Lottery Funding worth more than 100,000 over four years have failed to return a profit for community groups.
Organiser of the petition, Sean Kelly, said those who signed it were "fully supportive" of the festival but were seriously concerned about how it was being run, alleging last year's three-day festival lost almost 20,000.
He said: "There are serious concerns about the way the festival is being managed.
"We know the festival bought buses for advertising and as green rooms, but we have been told they were being driven around without the appropriate insurance.
"Our parish councillors are fantastic at their jobs. But we believe that no-one involved in running the festival has any qualifications to run the finances properly," said Mr Kelly, who described them as "over-enthusiastic amateurs".
"We want to know where the funding has gone, and we are all really hopeful we can still have a festival which can be run for the good of community groups in Spratton."
Chairman of Spratton Parish Council and vice-chairman of the Spratton Folk Festival Committee, Barry Frenchman, said the not-for-profit event had lost 3,000 over four years.
But he added: "I admit that certain things could have been done better.
"The people of Spratton have every right to ask questions and we are a democracy, so we will go forward in whichever way is decided at the next meeting. The people who run the festival are volunteers who give up hundreds of hours of their own time and none of them have a bad bone in their body."
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