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Dear Sirs
The proposed charging for policing at music festivals has three fundamental defects.
The first defect is in the concept of user pays. Who is the user of the police? The promoters? The arrested miscreants? The victims and potential victims of crimes? The whole community? I would suggest that it is indeed the whole community who should be served by the police, and thus the cost should be borne from general taxation.
The second defect is that demanding a ransom for the necessary security at a public entertainment is morally and ethically identical to operating a protection racket.
The third is that there seems to be no transparent process for calculating a fair charge for a reasonable level of policing, leading to a suspicion that the police may be extorting an inflated fee for an excessive presence.
The policing charges should be scrapped, or at worst, levied by an fair and open mechanism, if one can be devised.
Yours faithfully David Rotherham