Royal Albert Hall Bill [Lords]: Revival

That the promoter of the Royal Albert Hall Bill [Lords], which originated in the House of Lords on 23 January 2023 in Session 2022-23, should have leave to proceed with the Bill in the current Session, according to the provisions of Standing Order 188B (Revival of bills).—(The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means.)

That the promoter of the Royal Albert Hall Bill [Lords], which originated in the House of Lords on 23 January 2023 in Session 2022-23, should have leave to proceed with the Bill in the current Session, according to the provisions of Standing Order 188B (Revival of bills).—(The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means.)

I am pleased to support the revival motion before the House today. It is about 11 months since I moved Second Reading of the Bill last year. At that stage, it had already completed its passage through the House of Lords, and it was given a Second Reading without opposition. It then went into the Committee on unopposed private Bills, and the panel met in March this year under the chairmanship of the Chairman of Ways and Means. The Committee approved the Bill subject to an undertaking given by the Royal Albert Hall, which I will come back to. I do not want to repeat all of the speech I made on Second Reading, but I do want to set out again why the Bill is so necessary and beneficial, and not just to the Royal Albert Hall but to the many people who enjoy performances there.

The Royal Albert Hall is one of our most important cultural institutions. There can be few people in this Chamber, or indeed the country, who have not enjoyed performances at the hall—either live or broadcast—including the last night of the Proms, the Festival of Remembrance, Cirque du Soleil and, tonight, Elvis Costello. I should declare that I served as a trustee of the Royal Albert Hall, appointed by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, from 2018 to 2020. I was one of five independent trustees, and I also sat on the conflicts committee, which is an extremely important part of the management of the hall, and to which I will return. As a result, I gained a good understanding of the way in which the hall operates, and I saw how the council works to fulfil the charitable purposes of the hall.

The hall has operated successfully for 150 years, and to explain why this Bill is necessary, it is important to appreciate its history and the model on which it is based. The hall was the idea of Prince Albert. Sadly, he died before he could see it completed, but the corporation was set up in 1867 in his memory, and the hall was built and opened by Queen Victoria less than four years later. The initial funding for the building of the hall came from the commissioners of the Great Exhibition, but it was insufficient, so the remainder—the gap that needed to be filled—was met by payment in return for seats in the hall. It is perhaps a unique model of public-private partnership. The hall has around 5,500 seats, of which around 1,250—just under a quarter—are privately owned. Those seat holders are members of the corporation, and in some cases those seats have been passed down through families across generations. Others have been bought by charities, companies and individuals when they have come up for sale.

Ownership of a seat brings with it the right to attend certain performances—but not all—and the members elect from their ranks 18 out of the 23 trustees who run the hall. They also make a significant financial contribution each year through what is called the seat rate, which is currently around £2,250. That is an ongoing commitment of the seat holders to the continuation and the costs of the hall. On top of that, it has always been the case that seat holders agree to forgo their tickets for events held in the hall on just over 100 days each year. By giving up that right, the hall therefore has the tickets available either to offer to the promoter or to use for its own purposes. By doing so, it can attract higher artists, so it is of considerable financial benefit to the hall that the seat holders behave in that way.

I defer to my right hon. Friend’s superior knowledge in this area. I recognise the value of the asset. Can he reassure me on the concerns about conflicts of interests? Those people holding the seats are also trustees, so they are taking decisions for financial gain. Is he reassured that the process he is suggesting we follow will counter that issue?

I will make a couple of points to my hon. Friend. As I have said, I not only served as a trustee, but sat on what is called the conflicts committee. The conflicts committee has a majority of independent members—not of seat holders—and it is there to ensure that any decisions taken are done properly. While it may be the case that conflicts exist, that in itself is not a problem, so long as there are proper mechanisms in place to ensure that the current situation is not abused. Certainly no evidence has ever been suggested, as far as I am aware, of seat holders seeking to take decisions for their own benefit, rather than for the good of the hall. If they did do that, the Charity Commission would come down on them rapidly, so there is an existing control around that issue.

My hon. Friend is right that concerns have been voiced about how the hall operates. When the Bill went through the House of Lords recently, an amendment was passed relating to the resale of tickets, which is the other issue that some Members have raised. It was suggested that seat holders, if they wished to sell their seats, should be required to do so through the hall’s own ticket resale mechanism. Many do choose to do that, but the problem with that is twofold. The first is how the resale mechanism works. It pools the takings and redistributes them among all seat holders. If not all seats are sold, that could end up costing seat holders money. The second problem, which is more fundamental, is that these are property rights. It is the legal right of the seat holder to decide whether to use the seat himself or herself, to pass it to somebody else, or to sell it. It is a fundamental property right.

To meet the concerns that were expressed, and the amendment that was made in the House of Lords, the hall offered an alternative undertaking, which is that each year those trustees who are seat holders and had sold tickets during the course of the year would have the amount of money that they obtained as a result made public. Through that, there would be greater transparency, with anyone able to see that those seat holders who become trustees are not exploiting their position in that way. That undertaking was accepted by the panel of the Committee on unopposed Bills, and hence that undertaking is now being given by the hall in place of the amendment.

I was interested in what the right hon. Gentleman said about the pooling of money following resale through the hall’s box office. Would it not be palatable for the members of the hall to have an agreed price by which those tickets are resold? Instead of the money being pooled, they could receive their portion of the contribution that they make.

We are talking about very few events where tickets are sold at a much greater price than their face value. There will be some. The problem with what the hon. Gentleman suggests is that, at the end of the day, we are talking about somebody’s right as a legal owner of a property to decide what to do with it.

The seat holders have been extremely generous in the level to which they agree to support the hall. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and I agree with each other on many other occasions—we sit next to each other on the Foreign Affairs Committee—but on this we are on opposing sides. She has suggested, for instance, that the hall has benefited unfairly from the Government and the taxpayer because it received a loan of around £20 million during the covid pandemic.

I was a Minister in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport during covid. The cultural recovery fund amounted to £1.5 billion. If that had not been put in place, the entire cultural landscape of this country would have collapsed. In the vast majority of cases, the funding was grants. Cultural institutions—theatres, museums, galleries and music venues—were given grants by the Government, ranging from the Royal Opera House through to the Hot Box in Chelmsford, which I occasionally attend to see up-and-coming bands. All of them were beneficiaries, but the difference was that in the case of the Royal Albert Hall, it was not a grant, but a loan, and it is repaying that loan.

Order. Before I call the next speaker, it may be helpful if I point out that all we are really arguing about this evening is the revival of the Bill, not whether it is a good Bill. Obviously, however, Members will want to set some context.

If anyone had asked me three years ago, “How does the Albert Hall work?” I would have said that it was publicly owned, and that it put on events and collected the ticket money, and the money was spent on enabling people to continue to use the Albert Hall. However, it is not a bit like that. The Albert Hall is a charity, but it is also a business. It is both things at once. It is a charity to the extent that it was bailed out by the Government during covid, but it is a business in that a fifth of the seats were bought by people who, I am sure, were assisting in getting the Albert Hall built at a time when there was not sufficient funding for the construction to be completed. So some people bought seats, and they bought them at £100 each. A box of ten would cost £1,000, and a box of five would be £500. In 2017, someone who went to Harrods Estates would be able to buy a box for £2.5 million. In 2023, Kay & Co were selling a box for £3 million. A row of four stalls seats was advertised recently at £600,000. I laugh when the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) says that we should be grateful for the assistance of the people who now own these boxes and these seats for giving us a couple of thousand pounds a year to help with the ongoing costs of the Royal Albert Hall, because I think he is getting things out of proportion.

I am sure that the right hon. Lady paid as close attention to the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon as I did, but she has just repeated that during covid the Government, to quote her phrase, bailed out the Royal Albert Hall. My right hon. Friend has explained to the House that the Government made a loan that is being repaid by the Royal Albert Hall. I do not recall anyone in the House saying that providing the cultural support that the Government gave cultural institutions during covid was the wrong thing to do. In fact, we were all probably clamouring for more to ensure that our theatres and other institutions were kept afloat in a post-covid scenario. If the right hon. Lady has got that basic fact wrong, why should we believe anything else that she is about to say?

I have heard the hon. Gentleman make some good points in the past, but he has not made one tonight. If you lend some money to a business that is about to go under, you are bailing it out. Yes, it may pay you back later, but, really, we are talking about what colour angel is dancing on top of a pin.

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

I will give way once more, but then I must make some progress.

I should add that while the Government gave the hall £20 million as a loan, as it gave loans to so many institutions across the country, the seat holders—the members of the Royal Albert Hall —put in £2 million above and beyond what they had to provide under the arrangements normally, as support. The seat holders have been extraordinarily generous, and it is not the case that they have somehow exploited the Government. They put in their own money to the tune of £2 million to get the hall past covid.