The charity behind Leicester Comedy Festival has done the thing you do when a cashflow problem stops being a cashflow problem. It has told the regulator. The Big Difference Company has submitted a “serious incident report” to the Charity Commission over its ongoing financial issues, Chortle reported on 21 July. The Commission confirmed it is assessing the concerns raised. This is the same festival that put more than 500 acts on the bill in February and pulled roughly 100,000 people through Leicester. Five months on, a lot of those acts are still waiting for their money. I went through the maths of that back in May<\/a>. Back then, the festival’s own figure was that only 22% of artists had been paid on time.<\/p>\n Equity has been the loud voice throughout. Its Midlands official, Ian Manborde, has been blunt about who eats the cost when the Leicester festival’s books go wrong, in comments carried by AOL:<\/p>\n The problems with the company running Leicester Comedy Festival are terrible news for the many performers and other workers who are yet to be paid for their work this year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The union has managed to claw money back for a small handful of comedians directly out of ticket sales. We covered it when Equity recovered pay for three of them<\/a>. Three names cleared against a bill of more than 500, and a charity that takes its own finances to the Commission has generally given up on the rest arriving by itself.<\/p>\n A serious incident report is a formal notification that a charity’s trustees are legally required to file with the Charity Commission. They must file it when something poses a significant risk to the organisation’s operation, finances or reputation, including money problems. Filing one does not shut a charity down and it does not trigger an automatic refund to anyone who is owed. What it does is hand the Commission the job of checking the trustees are meeting their legal duties and managing the incident responsibly, after which the regulator can offer guidance or take further action. So the practical upshot for a comic who’s owed \u00a3600 is roughly nil in the short term, beyond the small comfort that somebody official is now looking at the ledger.<\/p>\n Yes, plenty of them. By the festival’s own admission around mid-May, only 22% of artists had been paid on time, and there’s been no clear payment schedule published for everyone else since. When the problem first surfaced, chief executive Michael Harris-Wakelam blamed cashflow and told Beyond the Joke the festival was trying to communicate that “this is a case of a small delay rather than ‘you won’t be paid'”. Five months qualifies as a fairly generous definition of small.<\/p>\n The wider picture around the Leicester festival has kept getting worse. A planned outdoor summer gig was scrapped earlier in the year<\/a>, and this month the High Street venue the charity ran, also called The Big Difference, was repossessed over unpaid rent. There’s a small grace note in among that: Anthony Lamb, the former Big Difference manager known to everyone as Big Tony, crowdfunded more than \u00a318,000 to relaunch the space himself under the name Forum Porcorum. Meanwhile the safety net for the acts has been coming from outside the festival entirely, through the hardship fund the Live Comedy Association set up<\/a> – a union and a trade body covering emergency costs for performers the festival itself put on the bill.<\/p>\n Chortle ran a companion piece the same day by Martyn Rowland, a magician who founded the entertainers’ admin platform Giggio, on getting paid on time, and it’s the more useful read of the two if you’re the one holding the invoice. He points to a survey of 60 entertainers in which 75% said they had experienced late, non, or partial payment in the past 12 months. Leicester is the loud example, but three in four of the rest were chasing money owed for last year’s work too.<\/p>\n Rowland’s advice is unglamorous and mostly about paperwork. Get a written contract with the fee, the payment due date and cancellation terms on it, even a short one, because a verbal agreement is only as good as the texts you can dig out later. Take a non-refundable deposit to hold the date. Invoice with your bank details and clear payment terms, then chase in escalating stages: polite reminder, sterner notice with a firm seven-day deadline, and finally a reference to the Late Payment of Commercial Debts Act, which lets you add interest of 8% plus the base rate and a fixed fee, starting at \u00a340 on debts under \u00a31,000. If you’re an Equity member, get the union involved early, and small claims through Money Claim Online is the backstop. His line about why any of this is reasonable is the one to keep: “After all, Sainsbury’s won’t deliver your shopping if you haven’t paid for it.”<\/p>\n None of that helps the acts already out of pocket in Leicester, whose only real levers now are Equity, the hardship fund and the Commission’s patience. It’s also why the Live Comedy Association has been pushing MPs to treat grassroots comedy as a sector worth protecting<\/a> rather than a hobby that happens in pub back rooms. The serious incident report is a paper trail, and paper trails are slow. Somewhere in Leicester there’s a comic still checking a bank app for a payment that was due on 19 April, which is a long time to keep refreshing a screen for \u00a3180.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nWhat is a serious incident report?<\/h2>\n
Are Leicester Comedy Festival’s comedians still unpaid?<\/h2>\n
Get it in writing before the festival stops answering<\/h2>\n