Scottish Media Goes For TITP

The Edinburgh-based paper is claiming the festival received “a secret injection of public money” just days before starting.

“Ministers agreed to provide last-minute funding to the tune of £150,000 to help bankroll the staging of T in the Park at its controversial new home in Perthshire,” it said.

Last year a survey by EKOS showed that TITP generates £2.7 million for the local economy and £15.4 for Scotland as a whole.

A spokeswoman for the government confirmed to The Scotsman that £150,000 was a one-off payment to help with relocation. TITP chief Geoff Ellis says the government money was hardly a secret and was “a relatively small contribution to the huge costs of moving site.”

After last year’s 85,000-capacity sellout on the old site at Balado, where it’d been for 18 years, it was revealed that new oil and gas pipelines that need to run through the site would force TITP to move to Strathallan.

Ellis didn’t appear pleased with the move and was quick to point out that a school and Aberdeen airport’s runway are also on the pipeline’s pathway but weren’t forced to move.

The festival’s debut on the new site was in jeopardy, when in April it was discovered a pair of ospreys had set up a nest on the Strathallan Estate.

The real problems started when the festival begun, as the usual 85,000-strong crowd dropped to 60,000 and Perthshire was hit by some Scottish rain.

The pickup points became mudbaths and the festival’s Facebook site was bombarded by complaints, most of them with a weather-related cause.