Community Theatre

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Wednesday 12th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Smart]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I obviously agree with him about the important role that community theatres play in our communities, and I will comment on the importance of clarity on longer-term funding. As he rightly says, theatres face increasing costs. When energy bills go up and it costs us more to heat our homes, they go up significantly more for theatres. I will come on to the capital spending that is needed and how we are putting at risk some of the community cohesion work that theatres can do.

The Forum theatre in my constituency faces an uncertain future because it has reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in the roof. It was forced to close while temporary repairs were made, and it was repaired with a temporary lifespan of five years. After a phenomenal campaign by the local community and local councillors pushed the local council to provide funding, the theatre is thankfully back open and back at the heart of the Romiley community.

Last April, the estimates for the cost of the work to fully remove the RAAC panels at the Forum and deliver a permanent fix was forecast to be up to £2 million. The work involves removing the current roof coverings, removing each of the RAAC panels individually and disposing of them, and then creating a new roof structure and making it watertight. Although the work will disrupt activities at the theatre, it is crucial to securing the long-term future of a beloved community asset.

The Forum theatre is owned by Stockport council. We all know there is a crisis in local government funding, and local councils across the country, including my Stockport council, have to deal with severe budgetary constraints. Simply put, Stockport council does not have the funds for the necessary building renovations at the Forum theatre to permanently remove the RAAC. Any money invested in local councils to support our cultural landmarks is undoubtedly well spent and will pay dividends.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that had previous Conservative Governments valued community theatres such as Clair Hall and the Martlets Hall in Mid Sussex, my constituents would still be enjoying all the benefits that arts and social spaces provide, and our council would not face the invidious choice between non-viable community spaces and entirely commercially led offers that simply cannot put the performing arts front and centre while staying financially afloat?

[Lisa Smart]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about the perilous state of local government finances, the knock-on impact on assets and services provided by councils, and how councils can support important work in our communities. It is quite difficult to measure the impact of bringing people together. I feel that we look at the arts as a cost rather than as an asset and a way to reduce costs in other areas. I will come to those points later.

The Forum serves as a hub for more than 30 local organisations: dance schools, community groups, bands, comedians and schools use the space. They rely heavily on the Forum for their events, because it is an affordable space compared with going into town and paying the price for city centre venues. Its usage is a testament to its importance and significance. The level of activity not only enriches the cultural life of my constituents, and more widely, but it stimulates the local economy. A study by the Society of London Theatre shows that for every pound spent on a theatre ticket, £1.40 is spent in the local economy. That boost is vital for the many independent shops, cafés and wine bars in Romiley, which benefit from the theatre’s bustling schedule.

At the centre of those statistics are the real lives of those in my community who benefit from the Forum. The theatre brings together children and young people from different backgrounds, from those who are more affluent to those who currently live in the care of the local authority. At the theatre, they grow together with shared passions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I like the way that the hon. Lady casually dismisses the £85 million of capital investment—it took quite a lot of work to secure that money. One of the first things that the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and I were lobbied about when we came into government last July was the state of many of the cultural institutions—theatres, museums, galleries and so on—that have been run by local authorities and are in dire capital need. Many of the organisations that we are talking about will be covered by that. If she wants to write to me about the specifics of that case, I will look into it. We had to decide where our priorities should lie. There are other avenues that other organisations can go down, but we wanted to make sure that there was a solid amount of money available in a single year: £85 million for capital projects in 2025-26 for the kind of theatres that many of us will be talking about that are, or have been, local authority-run.

The other intervention that the Department is engaged in is the Theatres Trust, which provides a great deal of unbiased advice to a variety of different theatres about their funding mechanism, their legal structures, their governance and what they can do about energy costs—a whole series of different things. I am very grateful to the Theatres Trust team, who play an important role in making sure that the whole sector works.

It is clearly easy for us to celebrate the big shows that I have already mentioned in the west end, such as Tom Hiddleston in “Much Ado About Nothing”. Those productions get lots of coverage and are very successful commercially, but we cannot have a successful commercial UK theatre industry without a successful subsidised UK theatre industry. We need that whole mix. An actress such as Glenda Jackson, who ended up winning two Oscars and was nominated for two more, and who was a great star of stage and screen making her way partly in theatre and partly in the movies, started in rep in Hoylake and West Kirby. We must remember that it is that whole mix, even in the changing environment of modern theatre, which has very few repertory theatres in the classic sense, that we really have to sustain.

I have already referred to the £85 million creative foundations fund, but I should also refer, as the hon. Member for Hazel Grove rightly did, to local government. The new plan for neighbourhoods that is being developed by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is precisely designed to look at how we can make sure our local neighbourhoods flourish. A key aspect of that must be the creative industries and our cultural institutions. People take so much pride in having a local theatre, a local music venue or whatever else it may be. We lose those organisations at our peril, although there are enormous challenges.

[Alison Bennett]

My concern is that, in west Sussex, we are on the fast track for local government reorganisation, and without a quick resolution to how we fund social care, many of the community theatres, which are council-owned assets, are at risk of being sold off. Would the Minister press the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on that point?

[Chris Bryant]

I have already had those conversations with the Ministry; it is obviously not simple when we are talking about local government reorganisation. I used to be a councillor in Hackney, so I know the pressures that are always on local government, but those pressures have been so intense for the last 14 years, with an ageing population taking up a much greater proportion of funding through social care, and looking after children in care, as well as very diminished budgets. Local authorities have really struggled to do what they are required to do, let alone what they are allowed to do, such as providing culture and leisure facilities.

One of the problems has been that local authorities have tended to have annual settlements rather than three-year settlements, and I hope that more of the latter will make a dramatic difference to how local authorities can plan for big and medium-sized projects in the cultural sphere. However, I will always make the case to any local councillor who walks through the door that simply cutting funding for the local theatre or leisure centre is an own goal. I tell them that they would then struggle to provide other services, lose pride in their local place, deprive people of career opportunities and make it more difficult to grow the local economy. We know that for every £1 spent on a theatre ticket or a live performance ticket, people are likely to spend several more on other things in the local community.

Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan]

My hon. Friend raises a really important point. This cannot be about shutting down avenues for young people to socialise with each other. Whatever action is taken to make it harder for young people to access social media, we have to make sure that other things are going on in society so that they do not feel that that is the only place they can go to socialise.

The petitioners’ view, as I said, is that we should ban access to social media until children are 16. I spoke to the NSPCC before this debate; its position is that it does not think an outright ban is the answer. Without changing the software or the devices, a ban on children using social media—without doing more—would be unenforceable. The NSPCC’s view is that a ban would push children into unregulated and more dangerous online spaces.

Does the Online Safety Act do enough? Several people I spoke to in preparing for this debate think that it does. For example, there is a requirement for social media companies to conduct children’s access assessments to determine whether children are likely to access their platform. There are online age assurance measures that require social media companies to assess whether their services are likely to be accessed by children and to adopt robust methods such as photo ID matching, facial age estimation and mobile network checks.

Age assurance measures are of course right, but groups such as Smartphone Free Childhood do not believe that risk assessments, and the Online Safety Act more broadly, go far enough. They do not advocate for an approach of risk assessment and risk reduction methods; rather, they say that the onus should be on the social media companies to demonstrate that their apps are safe for children to use and that, if they cannot, their app must not be used by children. That seems to be the opposite of putting the onus on the regulator to prove that an app is dangerous or harmful. It might well be that that would be something the code of practice under the Online Safety Act could do. It would require tightening that code of practice, so it would be useful to know whether the Minister agrees that the Act would be capable of reversing that burden, and that we ought to think about those methods.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

Does the hon. and learned Gentleman agree that, while legislation can go so far, we have a broader responsibility as adults in society and as parents—myself included—to make sure that we monitor not only what our children are using and how they use it, but our own habits? A headteacher in my constituency was alarmed that she had to write to parents to tell them that when they collect their infants from the playground, they should put their phones away and have eye contact and engage with their children.

[Tony Vaughan]

The hon. Lady makes a common-sense point: if we are going to advocate for change, we have to lead by example. It might be said that the harms we are talking about are a somewhat separate issue to that. Of course we need to take responsibility, but where we have social media companies that are pushing content that is objectively dangerous, we need to have the conversation that we are having today about how the system and social media companies should be forced to ensure that that space is a safe one.

AstraZeneca

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I would be delighted to meet my hon. Friend knows, as she knows, although I think it would probably be more useful for her if she were to meet Lord Vallance, who is the Minister for life sciences. My hon. Friend is absolutely right; we would of course much prefer this investment to go ahead and to have been able to get this deal over the line. However, it has not been possible, and we now have to look at different ways of ensuring that we strengthen the relationship with AstraZeneca. However, I would point to other investments that have been made in recent months, including in life sciences, to quite significant effect.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

The Financial Times reports that, during its negotiations with the Government, AstraZeneca raised concerns about the vaccine plant, but also about the rejection of one of its breast cancer drugs and the drug pricing mechanism. Does the Minister agree that AstraZeneca’s rejection of his Government’s final offer is not the only concerning issue for our biopharma industry, and will he assure me that he is raising issues around the regulatory and reimbursement processes with the Health Secretary and the Treasury as barriers to growth in a sector already struggling with post-Brexit red tape?

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Lady’s first point was on the voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing and access, which is reduced to an acronym that is not really an acronym: VPAG. This is, as it says on the tin, a voluntary agreement between Government, the pharmaceutical industry and the NHS, which is designed specifically to ensure that we protect the NHS’s medicines budget. It is voluntary, and AstraZeneca has always been a party to it on a voluntary basis. I am not sure that is the problem the hon. Lady thinks it is—although, if she has further evidence, I would be happy to speak to her.

I think she is also referring to the rejection by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence of a breast cancer drug. This is the first time in six years that a breast cancer drug has been rejected by NICE, and it is obviously concerning for everybody who wants to be able to use these drugs. However, we have an independent and much-respected system in the UK. I stand by that independence; I am not going to undermine it.

Artificial Intelligence Opportunities Action Plan

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Peter Kyle]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He said, “if we choose to”. This Government do choose to, and that means engaging with the Education Secretary on the skills agenda, and being determined to ensure that every community across the United Kingdom has equal access to the technology’s potential.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

The Secretary of State is a constituency neighbour, so he will know that the convergence of the AI expertise at the University of Sussex, sustainable power from Rampion wind farm and computer power expertise from Universal Quantum, based in Haywards Heath, creates an ideal ecosystem for supporting the UK Government’s ambitious AI strategy. Does he agree that our corner of Sussex is a strong contender to be a hub for sustainable AI development? Will he meet me to discuss those opportunities?

[Peter Kyle]

It will not surprise the hon. Lady or the House to hear that I agree with championing Sussex. I went to the University of Sussex myself; I am an alumnus. Its AI research centre was established in the 1960s. That shows just how long scientific endeavour in digital technology has been in full flow in this country. Of course, I look forward to meeting the hon. Lady, perhaps down in sunny Sussex.