The pettiness of Birmingham’s busking ban

Birmingham City Council is planning a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) that will prohibit people from ‘using amplification equipment, musical instruments or other items used as musical instruments’ in the city centre. This will include ‘noise associated with busking; street entertaining, street preaching and public speaking’. The order exempts emergency vehicles and anyone who has ‘written authorisation from the council’.

No doubt there have been some complaints, and perhaps problems, associated with certain incidents of busking or street preaching. But Birmingham’s blanket ban on all non-authorised ‘noise’ is extraordinary. It treats very varied activities – from singing to bagpipe playing to juggling to preaching – as merely a form of ‘noise’, which supposedly has a ‘detrimental effect on the quality of life’ in the city.

Given that all these activities are expressly designed to appeal to the public (buskers cannot survive unless a large enough number of people like their music enough to give them money), it is absurd for councillors to assert that busking as a whole has a ‘detrimental effect’. Busking ranges from the sublime to the cheesy. As well as variations in quality, it is also a question of taste – some people like some tunes and other people don’t. Yet, in the eyes of Birmingham City Council, everything from a concert pianist to a homeless man with his penny whistle is now just unauthorised ‘noise’.

This ban shows how councils are not dealing with specific problems as they arise, but treating all free public activities as implicitly ‘anti-social’ and better off suppressed. In effect, Birmingham City Council is assuming a monopoly over the city’s sound environment – the only amplified sound you will hear is that which has been explicitly authorised by the council.

The city’s visual environment is already tightly controlled, with restrictions on the billboards and posters that used to pepper city walls and lampposts. The council has even launched crackdowns on people putting up lost-cat posters and adverts for a charity Christmas lunch. Local authorities already control what we see in cities, now they also want to control what we hear, too.

Thankfully, the Birmingham ban excludes political protests or demonstrations, probably to avoid being challenged on free-speech grounds – but there is a lot of urban life that is not a political protest.

If this PSPO goes ahead, Birmingham will have lost something very valuable. It will be quieter but also duller and deader. It will have lost something of that quality of being a city, which is that you come across people plying their art in ways that surprise and please you – as well as sometimes annoy you.

Josie Appleton is director of the Manifesto Club civil-liberties group.