Royal Albert Hall Bill [HL]

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am more than happy to be a co-signatory to this amendment. In agreeing with it, I want to make it plain that I bear the Royal Albert Hall, an iconic national and international institution, no malice or ill will. Who among us has not been to the Royal Albert Hall to enjoy its performances? I think I first went there at the age of 17, when I watched a rock band where the principal singer and flautist stood on one leg. They were called Jethro Tull; some noble Lords may have seen them. My family’s link with the Royal Albert Hall is not just that; my mother must have attended some 20 remembrance services on the trot, as a proud servant of the Royal British Legion, in her finery and uniform.

This amendment gets to the heart of the issue. It deals directly with the conflict of interest which the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, has so expertly outlined. To his great credit, he has fought this fight for a very long time and has brought a group of us together in support of his position. It is a scam and an outrage that the current situation persists. So far as I am concerned, I might describe it, indelicately, as an operation which involves ticket touting for posh people—certainly, very rich people.

We need to sort this out because it is wrong. It excludes ordinary members of the public from enjoying the benefits and delights of the Royal Albert Hall, because the tickets that then go on sale from the box owners are at a premium price. The noble Lord has given one very good example concerning Ed Sheeran. That is not right. Those tickets should be returned to the institution itself and go on sale to the general public, so that they can enjoy the pleasures the hall provides.

The other point is simply this: the Royal Albert Hall itself derives no benefit from those ticket sales, and that cannot be right. That hall, like any other, requires upkeep, maintenance and conservation, and it is a very expensive venue to preserve. I would like to think that, at the end of this process, ticket sales will make a direct contribution to the preservation of what is a fine institution. With those few comments, I am more than happy to support the amendment.

The noble Lord has clearly outlined the Charity Commission’s and the former Attorney-General’s position on this issue. We have also been given the benefit of advice from the House of Lords Special Committee. So I invite others to join the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, in the Division Lobby to vote “Content” and support his amendment.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise for being momentarily late, and point out that I have to chair the Grand Committee at 5.15 pm, so I hope that our deliberations will have concluded by then. I also declare my interests as set out in the register: I own a management consultancy that specialises in advising charities about governance, management and strategy.

This debate has taken me back to two weeks in my life when I enabled groups of trustees to set up trading companies at a moment’s notice, because the Inland Revenue had suddenly discovered that various Age Concern shops were selling balls of wool to pensioners for the grand profit of a penny a ball. We probably made a total of about £20,000 over the whole country, but it got the guys at the Inland Revenue very excited at the time, and we had to change our approach.

I say that because every charity in the land, bar this one, that has a formal relationship with a company has to declare it. If it is a sufficiently close and significant relationship, it has to produce group accounts. The whole purpose of that is to show the interactions and the transfer of assets between the charity and the company, in order that members of the public can be sure that charitable assets are not being abused for private gain—every other charity but this one.

What we have heard already in the speeches so far, which I will not repeat, is that, because of historical accident, this charity is now at risk of being abused for private gain. A few years ago, the Charity Commission attempted to head off that situation by proposing a governance structure that would address the conflicts of interest as set out by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton. The Royal Albert Hall’s response has been not just to ignore that, but to compound in the Bill it has introduced the very problem that has been drawn to its attention. Therefore, we would be wrong to pass the Bill without this amendment, which seeks in a very modest way simply to do what other charities have to do as a matter of law.

The then Attorney-General’s decision not to back the Charity Commission in its attempt to bring the Royal Albert Hall into line with the rest of the charitable sector was wrong. Along with a number of other noble Lords, I happen to be a member of the Select Committee that looked a few years ago at the updating of charity law. We noted that the position of the Attorney-General on charity law was under some question, partly because of this case but also because of others. That is quite a serious thing. It is a very arcane part of law—but that is one of the things this House does rather well. We should be prepared to return to the question of the role of the Attorney-General in charity law.