T in the Park organisers blast Balado safety fears

The annual summer music festival will make the move to Strathallan Castle

T in the Park’s promoters said they were left with “no choice” and a bill for around £2 million due to long-standing concerns from the Health and Safety Executive. From next summer, it will be staged in the grounds of Strathallan Castle in Perthshire.

DF Concerts, who have staged the event over 20 years, said the festival would have become “damaged” at Balado, Kinross, due to increasingly “unworkable” restrictions forced on it.

And the Glasgow-based firm said it feared even ending up in a court battle if it tried to keep the event at its airfield home.

The company has spent almost three years trying to find a workable alternative for the event, which is worth £40m to Scotland’s economy. The event will retain its 85,000-capacity in 2015, although further expansion is possible in future years.

Chief executive Geoff Ellis said the relocation of the festival almost 20 miles away to the site near Gleneagles would have a major impact on the local community in Kinross. It is thought to be worth £2.7m a year to local businesses.

However, Mr Ellis insisted he had found the “perfect” home for T in the Park in the form of the remote 1,000-acre estate, which is surrounded by woodland and will be served by Glen-eagles rail station.

The HSE had raised repeated protests over the staging of T in the Park at Balado over the prospect of a disaster due to a North Sea oil pipeline which runs underneath the site.

Although Perth and Kinross Council granted the event another licence in February, councillors were told it would be the last T in the Park on the site due the HSE concerns.

Mr Ellis said: “We really had no choice in the matter.

“In the last couple of years the constraints have been on us. We were forced to move further and further away from the pipeline, which is ridiculous.

“The site is very safe – if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be allowed to go ahead there this year or any previous years.”

Mr Ellis revealed the Scottish Government had helped the festival prolong its stay at Balado, adding that the health and safety stand-off had been a huge frustration to Perth and Kinross Council, the owners of the festival site at Balado and BP, the operators of the pipeline.

He added: “It was only the HSE that seemed to think there was a problem.

“I kept hearing that it wasn’t about risk, it was about consequence, but without risk there is no consequence.”

Mr Ellis added: “It’s disappointing we have to leave Kinross. It’ll be a tearful goodbye, as much for the local community and local businesses.”

An HSE statement said: “The likelihood of any major accident at the pipeline is low but if one were to occur, the consequences would be catastrophic.”