Yorkshire Dales Food and Drink Festival organiser to face court over alleged offences - including Si King Facebook posts

The organiser of last year’s cancelled Yorkshire Dales Food and Drink Festival has been charged with a series of offences in connection with the event including allegedly failing to correct social media posts wrongly advertising an appearance by Hairy Biker star Si King.

Jon Arrowsmith and his company Cocker Hoop Creative have been charged with four offences following an investigation by North Yorkshire Council’s trading standards officers.

The festival had been due to be staged in Aireville Park in Skipton between July 18 and July 20, 2025 but was called off a fortnight before following multiple acts including celebrity chefs James Martin and Rosemary Shrager pulling out of attending.

A North Yorkshire Council spokesperson has now confirmed that both Arrowsmith, of Thurlstone Road, Walsall, Staffordshire, and the company, which is registered at Curborough Hall Farm Countryside Centre, Lichfield, Staffordshire, have been charged with the same set of offences.

The charges are failing to provide the necessary information for an entertainment licence application and not submitting a press notice ahead of a necessary deadline; offering tickets for sale to the public without providing the correct information about the event; failing to confirm contracts with chefs and other acts who were due to appear at the food and drink festival and failing to correct Facebook posts advertising an appearance of television presenter Simon King despite the appearance being cancelled.

Arrowsmith has been summoned to appear in court before York magistrates on September 2. He has not yet made a plea.

When the event was cancelled last year, Arrowsmith said he was “so, so sorry” the event had to be called off. In a statement on Facebook, he said: “It is with a heavy heart that I must admit defeat and share the news that the Yorkshire Dales Food & Drink Festival will not go ahead this year.

“This is not a decision I have taken lightly. We have worked tirelessly over the last year to stage a festival that Yorkshire could be proud of, but there were too many challenges that we did not foresee at the start of this journey and too little time to fix them.”

The event had due to be staged by Cocker Hoop Creative after Events by B3 Ltd, the previous company which ran the popular event went into liquidation in 2024.

The festival was originally founded in 2015 and had become the largest food and drink festival in the UK, taking place at Funkirk Farm near Skipton and attracting more than 30,000 visitors a year.

In 2023, The Hairy Bikers made an emotional return to the event following Dave Myers’s cancer diagnosis. Mr Myers, who died in February 2024, told The Yorkshire Post in 2023 how much the festival meant to him.

He said: “This is much more than just a food festival. It’s a family festival. When you go to a lot of food festivals you go to see the producers and the so-called celebrity chefs, and this is much more of a hybrid festival, it’s a bit of a music festival, a family festival, and also you’ve got the food.”