The Value of Sussex Events

What do we actually know?

Sussex attracts around 62 million visitors a year, contributing an estimated £5 billion to the regional economy. Its summer events are among the most visible parts of that: fourteen major festivals, shows and carnivals, from Glyndebourne and Goodwood to Rye Jazz and the Worthing Festival, together drawing well over a million attendances between May and September.

No assessment has ever calculated their combined contribution. Four events have a published, independently assessed figure. A fifth, Eastbourne’s Airbourne, has a council-cited figure of £27 million, but the report quoting it does not identify the underlying study or state a methodology. The remaining nine have no citable public figure at all.

Attendance is well documented. Value is not.

Estimated attendance figures are more widely reported. Brighton Pride draws around 450,000 people, roughly two thirds from outside the city. The Festival of Speed draws more than 200,000, Brighton Festival and Fringe around 150,000–200,000, and Glyndebourne more than 90,000 across its May to August season. Attendance tells us how many people come. It tells us nothing about what they spend or what the event returns to the place hosting it.

Why the gap matters now

Sussex is being asked to make an evidence-led case for investment, devolution and place. Its events are one of the clearest demonstrations of how the region uses public space to build shared identity, and they sit directly inside the Government’s Pride in Place agenda. Making that case on four studies, the oldest of them thirteen years old, is not a strong position to negotiate from.

Where the evidence stops

Ten of the fourteen events reviewed here have no published economic assessment. Several are among the largest gatherings in their local areas. Several are free or low-barrier to attend, which makes them the hardest to measure and the most likely to be undercounted.

Should social value be monetised?

Conventional impact assessment often discounts spending by local residents as deadweight: money already circulating locally rather than genuinely additional. Sussex’s events are not only for visitors. Around 130,000 of Brighton Pride’s attendees are city residents whose experience, in economic terms, is currently treated as worth nothing.

The case for restraint

Both methods are gaining ground as the limits of spend-only metrics become better understood, but neither is straightforward. Both add survey burden, contingent valuation can make attendees at a free event think a charge is coming, which carries reputational risks; and the WELLBY approach rests on a judgement about how long any wellbeing uplift lasts.

There is a deeper objection. Money and markets have moral limits, as Michael J. Sandel argues in The Moral Limits of Markets, and treating every benefit as transactional, even by proxy, risks eroding the human connection and place-based belonging that these events exist to create. A region that puts a price on civic pride may end up making decisions that begin with investment, rather than social value.

Data Sources

Figures are reported as originally published, with no inflation uprating applied. Every figure is drawn from a publicly available source. Events shown as unassessed have no independent study or citable public figure.