Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-183)
SOLT, TMA
1 FEBRUARY 2005
Q180 Ms Shipley: —Inreach and a
total theatre experience; two things.
Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen: —When
in many, many cases those buildings not just the Comedy but to
go round the theatres the Shaftesbury, all four theatres on Shaftesbury
Avenue, the St Martin's, the Savoy, the Garrick. You simply do
not have the physical space in which you could do any of those
things.
Q181 Ms Shipley: So no chance of innovation
in all these named theatres?
Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen: In those
theatres that I have named I can think of no way of providing
the total theatre experience that the National Theatre does very
well.
Q182 Ms Shipley: And the regional theatres
by the sound of it.
Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen: And some
regional theatres which receive significant subsidy for that purpose.
Chairman: I do not believe you have got
the tiniest social obligation of any kind. You are commercial
enterprises which own theatres in order to make money out of putting
on entertainment to which people go and I think that is a perfectly
reputable thing to do and your latest statistics show that you
are meeting a public demand. Furthermore, at the risk of a public
differing with Chris Bryant, I believe, without myself passing
a judgment (which I have got no need or right to do) on your application
for Lottery funds it is in essence an ideal form of application
since there is no chance whatever of the Treasury ever giving
you this money and, that being so, it is a very good example of
the additionality principle which the Treasury is ditching the
whole time but on this occasion is actually observing. Nor, with
reference to Mr Fabricant, do I believe that you do not have a
right to Lottery money because you are in London and somebody
buying a ticket in Wigan is not in London because after all the
Eden Project is in the South of Cornwall and the Lowry Theatre
is in Salford and even somebody in Wigan may not wish to go to
Salford, let alone to the South of Cornwall. Having placed all
that on the record—
Chris Bryant: Let alone going to Wigan—
Q183 Chairman: Actually I am very fond
of Wigan. If you go to Wigan you get this George Orwell thing,
the Wigan Pier Experience. I recommend that you go and have a
look at it. It was also Lottery funded. With regard to the application,
could I ask you, first of all, are you going to make the bid to
the Heritage Lottery Fund on the ground that they are historic
buildings, and some of them no doubt are listed, or are you going
to do it to the Arts Council or are you going to do what my friend
Felicity Goody did with the Salford and apply to every Lottery
distributor in sight in the hope of winning on some of them? Secondly,
would you be able to provide the matching funds?
Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen: We are
not applying to everyone in sight that we can think of. We are
talking to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council and
the London Development Agency. We are having those conversations
through the medium of a working group which includes the Theatres
Trust who you saw last week, the Society of London Theatres and
the DCMS themselves, so this is a discussion process rather than
a bid out of the cold, in which we are talking to them about how
they think together we might find a way of making this possible
if they agree that it should be made possible. So we are talking
to them about it because the Arts Council has proper objectives
in this, and we believe, for the reasons you described, the Heritage
Lottery Fund has proper objectives in this and because of the
economic benefits to London the LDA has proper reason to be looking
at this. The matching funds? Yes, we think we can find the matching
funds. We have had a large number of internal industry meetings
and discussions about it and we believe that with what is already
being spent, what will be spent and a couple of ways of finding
some additional money, that we can find it. While we talk of £125
million from each side making up £250 million at 2003 prices,
we are talking about a 15-year plus project which does mean we
are talking about, I round numbers, £15 million a year, which
comes down to, if all three public sources contributed equally,
£2.5 million a year from each of them and £7.5 million
a year from the industry. When you break it down into the smaller
sums in this way it all seems more possible than it does when
you think of £250 million.
Mr Pulford: For the record, just
to confirm that all but five of the commercially operated theatres
in the West End are listed buildings.
Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much
indeed.
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