ORGANISERS of Scotland’s biggest music festival, T in the Park, have revealed a reshuffle of their team following traffic and access problems at last year’s event.
T in the Park director Geoff Ellis apologised last year after traffic delays and congestion at the new site for the weekend rock, pop and dance festival, at its new venue of Strathallan Castle, Perthshire.
The operational team for the festival, which once again will be held at the castle site this year, now includes a new security manager, traffic manager and site management company.
The former T in the Park Police event commander, Colin Brown, has been named security manager, and former road police inspector Ian Martin will take on the role of traffic manager. Both are new positions.
APL Events has been appointed to look after site management when the festival returns to Strathallan Castle from July 8-10.
This week’s announcement comes as part of DF Concerts & Events’s continuing plans to address what it said was “some teething issues” from the 2015 event.
Last year there were reports of traffic problems at the site, long delays entering and leaving the locationsite, with some revellers forced to sleep in their cars and stay on the site.
Colin Rodger, event manager of T in the Park, said: “We’ve had a full de-brief on the 2015 festival with all relevant agencies, including Police Scotland, Traffic Scotland and Perth and Kinross Council, as well as festival goers and local residents. We have listened to every single comment and we thank everyone for their valuable input.
“We are now focused on delivering the 2016 festival and we know where we need to improve.
“By restructuring the management of key areas, such as the site and security, we will solve issues from last year’s event.”
Mr Martin has worked on the local roads of Perth and Kinross for over 20 years.
He has been involved in the road planning of T in the Park since its first year at Balado, as well as working on other major events throughout Scotland.
APL Events specialises in the production of large scale indoor and outdoor music festivals and have worked on some of the UK’s biggest music festivals, including Download and Creamfields.
The festival’s event team are currently working on a “full improvement plan” of solutions which will be revealed in full in the coming months.
Mr Brown said he has worked at the festival for several years and is looking forward to “revamping the security set-up”.
He added: “This year we want to make sure all festival-goers can have fun and feel safe while on site, with security staff fully briefed and the right numbers of staff in the right places. We’re confident we’ll have measures in place so that everyone can haves a great weekend in July.”
Mr Martin added: “I’ll be working closely with organisers and locals to make sure everyone - from festival goers to local residents - have a safe and enjoyable weekend at Strathallan Castle.”.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article