---

Entertainment: Facilities

My Lords, it is great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, especially as we are usually found together on Latin America; here we are on a domestic issue. Like other speakers, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, for his splendid introduction which really sets the scene. As other speakers have said, nobody knows more about it than him. The forward to the excellent Theatres Trust report, to which my noble friend Lady Valentine referred, states: "““Commercial theatre ownership and management is a financially precarious business and relies a lot on huge enthusiasm””." How right. I speak with feeling, as a former member of a small theatrical investment syndicate. We invested in straight plays—musicals were way above our capitalisation limits. Backers are rightly known colloquially as ““angels””; others may well call them ““damn fools””. However, in my 30 years in that role, the net result may have been zero but it gave me, as an enthusiast, a feeling of being an theatrical impresario manqué—very manqué, in my case, but a great deal of fun. A further past interest is that I succeeded my noble friend Lord Rix as a trustee of the Theatre of Comedy, which gradually metamorphosed into the advisory council of the Shaftesbury Theatre. It was a purely honorary role. The Shaftesbury Theatre had to close in 1973 after parts of the ceiling fell in during a performance of ““Hair””. The subsequent campaign to save the theatre prevented it from becoming an office block. In light of what has been said, perhaps that was a pity, but there it is. It is on the fringe of the West End and, for many years, actors considered that it had a jinx on it. I am glad to say that the myth is now dead and the current show, ““Hairspray””, is a huge success and playing to packed houses. In the same Theatres Trust report, there is a good section on the economics of theatre ownership. In this context, the Shaftesbury has a special problem in that it is one of the few listed theatres in single ownership and not part of a group. It can hardly carry out major refurbishment and modernisation, so very necessary, when a show is running. Here again there is a problem with the Treasury, which is a becoming a familiar problem to the noble Lord, Lord Davis, who will reply, who hears about this at regular intervals from all of us. The theatre has to pay tax on the annual profits, and there is no provision to accumulate them to have them ready at the end of a run. There needs to be some sort of offset arrangement to make the necessary provision. Meanwhile, it also pays large business rates to the local council. Although I have used the Shaftesbury Theatre as an example, this problem applies to any listed theatre in single ownership throughout the country and to some groups, especially the smaller ones. One obvious answer is to delist, as has been mentioned, but I hope the Minister will have something to say about the tax possibilities and what we can do.