Emily Thornberry

The right hon. Gentleman has told us how many seats are owned privately. Let us suppose that £2 million were to be divvied up among them, bearing in mind that it is possible to buy a box for £2.5 million or £3 million, or to buy six seats for £600,000. As I have said, we need to get this into proportion. Not only do these people own the seats; the reason they own them and they are worth so much money is that they can sell them, and they can sell them on the black market, and they can sell them for whatever price they want. I hear the right hon. Gentleman saying that sometimes those seats do not go for a lot of money, but tell that to Ed Sheeran. The seats for his performances were being sold at £6,000 a night, and he complained, as did a large number of other artists who have appeared at the Royal Albert Hall. It is bad enough for there to be a black market for ticket touts, but tickets being sold by the people who own the seats in the Royal Albert Hall takes that to a new level—and it goes further. Not only do those people own the seats and trade them among themselves, and sell them for large amounts of money; according to the constitution of the Royal Albert Hall, they are the people who need to run the Royal Albert Hall. So there we are: it is a charity when it comes to getting public money as a bail-out, but when it comes to anything else, it is somehow a business. I do not understand how it cannot be an obvious and manifest conflict of interest for people who benefit from the Royal Albert Hall to be running the Royal Albert Hall, and for it still to remain a charity, and I am not alone. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman knows the views of Victoria Prentis, who was Attorney General in 2024. She is now in the other place, and is a very sound woman. She has said: “It is widely acknowledged that the constitution of the Corporation of the Hall of Arts and Sciences”— that is, the Royal Albert Hall— “gives rise to a potential conflict between the private interests of seat-holding trustees and the Corporation’s charitable objects. This potential conflict is of significant concern to the Charity Commission and many well-informed observers.” So that is what the problem is. When I was shadow Attorney General, representatives of the Royal Albert Hall came to see me. I hope that I am not disclosing any confidences, but I made it perfectly clear to them that if they were going to bring any legislation before this place and ask us to spend our time looking at legislation relating to the Royal Albert Hall, we needed to sort this out. We could put this into legislation. The Royal Albert Hall cannot change unless we put it into legislation, because that is the way in which the Royal Albert Hall was originally put together. We must sort out the governance, and we must sort out the fact that these people are selling their seats on the black market. They are selling them to ticket touts. Those seats should only be sold through the ticket office, as they are at the Royal Opera House and at theatres. Why should these people have the benefit of being able to sell their these seats on the black market? It is undermining everything. If members of the public thought that such a beloved institution as the Royal Albert Hall had such a racket going on, they would be outraged, as I was when I first heard about it. I told the representatives of the Royal Albert Hall, when they came to see me three years ago, that unless they brought in those changes in legislation, I would object, and I am just keeping to my word. Let us look back at the history. Originally, the legislation was going to be about the fact that extra seats were put into the boxes, contrary to the rules. The owners thought, “We are going to get into trouble here”. They wanted to bring in legislation to allow boxes of 12 instead of boxes of 10, because boxes of 10 were within the rules and they were putting 12 seats in them, and making that much more profit as a result. They then thought, “Oh, we cannot do that”, so they wanted to introduce legislation. They then pulled that bit of the legislation, but not before it was advertised online that there were going to be 12-seat boxes. Someone was going to make a lot of money out of this. They then ditched that bit but have kept this other bit, which makes a technical point: seat owners are restricted from selling seats for every and any event. For example, people will be glad to hear that no one is making a profit from the Remembrance Sunday commemoration at the Royal Albert Hall. Those seats are sold properly through the box office, and none of this nonsense is allowed on that night. There was a limited number, which the owners then agreed that they would increase, and a small number of people challenged that in court. I appreciate that that may be uncomfortable for some people, but I do not see why Members of this House should spend their time promoting legislation that simply looks after the interests of a small number of people who already make a great deal of money out of owning seats in the Royal Albert Hall. It seems to me that we should be demanding that the Royal Albert Hall change its governance processes, stop the way in which it sells tickets, and get on and deal with itself in a way that is 21st century and not anything else. Why it is appropriate that whereas the rest of the tickets for a charity event are sold for the sake of the charity, such as the Teenage Cancer Trust, trustees on the board of the Royal Albert Hall—a so-called charity—can sell the tickets to line their own pockets? We have a charity event run by a charity, yet those running that so-called charity are allowed to make a profit out of it. It is scandalous, and it should be stopped. I know that Conservative Members will say that it is the trustees’ right and that they should be allowed to do what they like with private property. Well, they can go ahead and sell their seats to make a bunch of profit for themselves, if that is what they want to do, but I do not see why Parliament’s time should be used to help facilitate that. If the trustees of a charity are supposed to be running it, why are they thinking about how they can generate the most money and the most profit for themselves? It is quite obvious that there is a conflict of interest at the centre of all this, and it is not an appropriate use of this House. At this stage, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson) for all the work that she has done in this area over the years. She has exposed some really shocking examples of ticket abuse, including by one of the hall’s vice-presidents, who offered tickets for the publicly funded BBC Proms for up to 10 times what the hall thought they were worth. It is the most outrageous profiteering that has led to this Bill being amended in the House of Lords. Peers did not ask for that much in the House of Lords—it was pretty tame, frankly—but the amendment said that trustees should use the ticket return scheme that the hall runs, not sell their tickets in backroom deals while the hall gets a pittance and has to beg the public for bailouts. To have that amendment struck out and replaced by a commitment that the trustees will be transparent about their profiteering, rather than cease it, is disappointing and inappropriate, to say the least. I also note that although family members are included in that commitment, other individuals are not, making it still perfectly above board for a trustee to give their tickets to friends and associates, who can in turn go ahead and sell them instead. I know the corporation is desperate to get this Bill through so that it can protect itself against legal challenge, but I want us to stop and think about who it really benefits. Who benefits from striking out the amendments? Not the public—that is for sure. Publishing some information on some of the profits of some of the sales on a website once a year just does not cut it. The truth is, what the trustees have here is a magic money tree, and they do not want to give it up. The corporation said that the amendment passed in the Lords was “unnecessarily restrictive and financially punitive”, but one might say that charging £6,000 to see Ed Sheeran is also pretty restrictive and is not something that he appreciates, as he has made clear. I urge my colleagues to reject this Bill as it currently stands and to instead secure some much-needed reform to the board of trustees, which seems to have forgotten who it is meant to serve.