The future of the Notting Hill carnival could be in jeopardy without “urgent funding” from the government, according to a leaked letter from its organisers.
The carnival’s chair, Ian Comfort, has written to the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, to request public money, the BBC reported on Wednesday.
It follows a review of the festival in west London that began in 1966, which identified “critical public safety concerns” that needed additional funding to address, the letter said.
Comfort wrote that the money was “essential to safeguarding the future and public safety of this iconic event”, but did not state a figure.
The independent safety review, whose findings and recommendations have not been made public, was commissioned by the carnival’s organisers and paid for at a cost of £100,000 by the Greater London Authority (GLA), Kensington and Chelsea council and Westminster city council.
In the leaked letter to Nandy, Comfort also referred to a separate report published in April by the London Assembly. He said the research highlighted the increasing strain placed on the Metropolitan police during large-scale public events.
“Limited resourcing has restricted the police service’s ability to respond to growing operational pressures,” Comfort said in the letter.
He went on to say that increased investment in stewarding and crowd management was “now essential to allow the police to focus on their primary role of crime prevention and public protection”.
Comfort added that a failure to secure immediate additional funding “risks compromising public safety and jeopardising the future of the carnival”.
The carnival chair said although the GLA and the two councils had provided “substantial support” for stewarding during past festivals, they could no longer “meet the growing operational requirements identified in the review”.
The Met police’s assistant commissioner, Matt Twist, previously raised concerns of a “mass casualty event” at the carnival due to crowd density.
Giving evidence to the London Assembly police and crime committee last September, Twist said: “While we acknowledge that crime often gets the headlines, the thing that worries me most is the crowd density and the potential for a mass casualty event.”
The carnival, second only to Brazil’s Rio carnival in size and considered to be the largest street event in Europe, attracts about 2 million people over the August bank holiday weekend. This year’s event is scheduled to take place on 24 and 25 August.
The Met had about 7,000 officers on duty for last year’s festivities, drawn from local policing teams and specialist units.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport told the BBC it would “respond to the letter in due course”.
Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian human rights activist based in London, put on an indoor Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall (now Camden Town Hall) in north London in 1959, which is credited with inspiring Notting Hill carnival.
In 1966 the first outdoor festival took place on the streets of Notting Hill, with Rhaune Laslett, a social worker of Native American and Russian descent, organising an event for local children.
According to the carnival’s website, Laslett was a community activist with a history of addressing inter-cultural tension in the area since the violent race riots of the 1950s and set out to include the local West Indian community in her event.
The organisers of Notting Hill carnival have been contacted for comment.
