Allow drive-in events in Level 3 areas, organisers plead

Previous drive-in events were staged earlier in the year

Events, such as drive-in movie showings, are only currently allowed in Level Two areas.

Last week it emerged organisers had pulled the plug on a series of festive movie screenings due to be staged at Edinburgh Airport in the run-up to Christmas.

Now operators have come together to demand the events are reclassified to allow them to take place.

Unique Events, itison, 21CC Group, XL Event Lab, and INDY Cinema have signed the statement and warned that hundreds of jobs will be lost if they are not allowed to continue.

The joint statement says: “This Tuesday, 420 creative sector jobs will be lost and 18,000 families will face an even bleaker winter and Christmas period, as the Scottish Government has not followed suit with their counterparts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in allowing drive-in activities to take place in in far harsher equivalent tiers.

“Scotland’s Drive-In operators have come together to urge the Scottish Government to reclassify drive-ins as a tier three activity this Tuesday and follow the advice of their own policymakers. It has been recognised globally that drive-ins are exceptionally safe activities, and indeed allowed in Scotland until October.

"They are seen as extremely safe by clinicians, with households safely cocooned within their own bubble, in a highly controlled outdoor environment. With hundreds of thousands of Scots now allowed inside indoor hospitality and retail, there is no logic to delivering a further hammer blow to Scotland’s creative sector.”

The government has previously turned down a plea from Unique Events for an exemption to be made to allow the screenings of films like Home Alone, Frozen, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life and The Holiday to go ahead. Officials say the events would “still have the congregating factor of large numbers travelling to a single destination for a prolonged period of time, which would increase the likelihood of transmission through the use of shared services such as toilets and catering.”