Glastonbury Festival has come a long way since it was first established in 1970. In its 50-year history, the Festival has developed and changed, growing from an attendance of 1,500 in 1970 to a capacity of 210,000 in 2022.
During this time much of the social landscape has changed and the Festival has evolved with these changes, offering an increasingly diverse range of music and contemporary performing arts across over 100 stages, of which we are incredibly proud. However, we realise we can always do more to ensure that we are being proactive in embedding diversity and inclusion in everything that we do.
The Black Lives Matter movement has had a profound impact on us, as it has globally, and highlights the need for us all to take action on both a personal and organisational level. This has propelled us with a greater urgency on this agenda.
We recognise that the Festival has grown within a wider society where discrimination on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, visible or unseen disabilities, sexual orientation, heritage, religion, age, family status, social class or education, has perpetuated structural inequalities which limit people’s life chances and the opportunities available to them.
We have been listening to the experiences of our audience, crew and artists; and are renewing our commitment to identifying and addressing inequality wherever it might exist within the Festival.
We are taking a more planned approach to this work, so that we can better understand where we are as an organisation by undertaking a detailed internal review of the Festival’s existing policies and structures, working alongside experts in equality and anti-discrimination. Where necessary, our existing policies will be updated for both our organisation and the significant number of contractors, suppliers and other businesses who work together with us to produce the Festival, in order to ensure that our values are shared and reflected throughout the site.
This review is not just about addressing discrimination or adverse impact, we want to positively promote equal opportunities by adopting anti-racist and anti-discrimination policies. To that end, the aim of the review is to help us prioritise the work we need to do and the steps we need take, to create an increasingly diverse Glastonbury Festival.