Newquay Town Council believes issues that arise from the staging of the Boardmasters Music Festival need to be addressed before organisers are permitted to increasing the capacity. 

Boardmasters plans to increase the size of its popular annual music from 50,000 in 2023 to 58,000 people this year and 65,000 in 2025 to take the event “to the next level.” 

But the town council’s planning committee has stated various issues should be resolved before the increase is allowed, such as the proposed traffic management system and how it is implemented. 

Councillors also raised concerns about the safety of festival goers walking to the site and would like better crowd control for people crossing the road to Watergate Beach. 

Joanna Kenny, the chairman of Newquay Town Council’s planning committee, said: “The committee were unanimous in believing the Boardmasters festival was a huge asset to Newquay but that didn’t mean it should not be properly managed to protect adjacent businesses and have the best arrangements in place to ensure the safety of attendees.    

“We felt it odd that there was not an accompanying planning application.    

“We know of objections having been formally raised by residents, which means that the application should be called to a licensing sub-committee; and that if the town council wished to be involved in that review, we would need to make a representation now.     

“Accordingly, we raised the traffic management system which had been a problem for years both in what it proposed and how it was implemented.     

“And looked at the safety of the number of individuals walking back up the road to the site, anecdotally put off from using the buses provided because of their high price.  

“We agreed with Cllr John Fitter who joined us for this item that there needed to be better crowd control at the crossing over to Watergate beach, watching the hordes there, it wouldn’t take much to have a serious accident.    

“Our point for the license was if these were problems now, they would be very much worse with an increased number of attendees, and we believed the issues should be resolved before permission was given for the increase.”