Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
280-299)
MR DAVID
MOBBS, MS
RUTH JARRATT
AND MR
STEPHEN LLOYD
8 JULY 2008
Q280 Paul Flynn: What procedure is
that?
Mr Mobbs: That is a rigid sigmoidoscope,
which should be the first stage in the diagnosis of whether you
have got colon cancer, for example.
Q281 Paul Flynn: Okay; these are
provided. There are a lot of diagnostic tests that can be provided
for all kinds of diseases in an ideal world with no health service
in this country, in Germany, in France, can afford them all. Is
this a specialist service that you are providing?
Mr Mobbs: No. These services are
provided in other independent hospitals and in the NHS.
Q282 Paul Flynn: Why should people
come to you rather than go to the NHS when it is quicker?
Mr Mobbs: They choose to come
to us because of the quality of service we offer.
Q283 Paul Flynn: You get more accurate
diagnoses, would you say? You diagnose more accurately?
Mr Mobbs: I would not go as far
as to say we diagnose more accurately. I think the patient's experience
is better. One in three patients were put off of having an operation
because they are frightened of a cross-infection, for example.
Q284 Paul Flynn: Yes, you said you
had one case. Was it one patient or one case?
Mr Mobbs: One case.
Q285 Paul Flynn: Ruth Jarratt, I
will be the token philistine as everyone is being very nice to
you. Why is it the Royal Opera House? Why is it not the People's
Opera House or the Peasants' Opera House? Do you get money from
the Royal family?
Ms Jarratt: No, we certainly do
not get any money and I am not an expert on Royal Charters. As
for why we receive these Royal Charters, I cannot tell you much
more.
Q286 Paul Flynn: There was a fly
on the wall series about the Royal Opera House some years ago.
Do you remember it?
Ms Jarratt: It was, as they used
to say, good box, ie, it was a good show.
Q287 Paul Flynn: It seemed to the
average viewer to be a group of neurotic egomaniacs having a row
that went on week after week. Would that be a fair description,
or was it even better than that?
Ms Jarratt: It is probably not
appropriate for me as part of the regime that was brought in after
the rebuilding to pass comment on how the operation was run beforehand,
but indeed it was reopened, if you like, under a new administration
with new and clearer expectations around access and all the things
we have been talking about this afternoon, and I would say that
it is hard to compare the two organisations. What is common is
the quality of the art, but I think everything else about the
organisation has changed.
Q288 Paul Flynn: We are all generally
prejudiced in your favour on this but I think it is fair to say,
that it is very much a minority appeal to put on an opera by Janácek
for customers in the Dog and Duck and various other things. It
is very much a tiny, elitist minority and you get a huge subsidy
as an opera house, but why on earth are you a charity on top of
that?
Ms Jarratt: I would not mind returning
to the royal point for a minute and starting with that. I mentioned
that we had done a couple of Citizens' Juries, and it is interesting
that our citizens seem to have a lot less trouble with the idea
of "royal" than some other people, than some commentators,
for instance. I would just like to say that, that it does not
seem that the citizens of our country have a particular problem
with the "royal" bit. To move on to the point you were
making about why should the organisation be a charity, the arguments
that seem to be well understood and well accepted, are to do with
excellence. It has been described as setting a gold standard of
aspiration and performance, within the arts for our artists, for
other companies. At the end of the day, if somebody really does
not like football or really does not like opera or really does
not like some particular form of sport or art, it is hard to convince
them that any form of public support might be well applied to
that, but for those who can see that ordinary people can have
an amazing, often deep and uplifting experience of going to ballet,—and
we do as much ballet as opera, I should point out; it is called
the Opera House but it is the home of the Royal Opera and the
Royal Ballet—when we see the impact of people coming into
our building, of working with us on education programmes, when
we see what an encounter with the Royal Opera or the Royal Ballet
can do in counterpoint to poverty of aspiration, you could say,
you need a heart, you need a soul, you need eyes, you need senses
to feel that impact, and if there are amongst those a few people
for whom it just does not do it, then I accept that, but when
I listen to those kids, and, as I say, we can hear the sound they
make during and after the show, they do not seem to have the same
problem that a small group of commentators have in getting their
head round this idea. I really do not get off on sport. Occasionally
I get caught up in the end of a tennis match, as happened on Sunday
afternoon, but it is very interesting that people in this country
seem to have more trouble getting their head round certain forms
of art than they do round certain forms of sport and I think the
comment made earlier about different European traditions, different
traditions in different countries, maybe has built up a head of
steam behind certain ideas that certain art forms should be almost
elitist, whereas I think the people of our country who have a
chance to experience those things and often experience them younger
when maybe those prejudices are less forced upon them, have opened
their eyes, opened their hearts and opened their souls to art.
Kelvin Hopkins: Without Shakespeare we
would be impoverished but the majority of people do not enjoy
Shakespeare very much.
Chairman: The Committee is going beyond
its remit but it is all terribly fascinating.
Q289 Paul Flynn: Mr Lloyd, I would
just like to ask you some questions about the comment you made
about the charity that was set up to deal with 12 poor boys and
went beyond its remit. What are they doing now? Have they found
12 poor boys?
Mr Lloyd: They already had 12
poor boys. They also had 12 poor girls so they are going to expand
their objects. They are not my clients.
Q290 Paul Flynn: What proportion
of their work is devoted to these 24 poor people?
Mr Lloyd: I could not possibly
tell you because this was based on a two-minute conversation with
this person. It is not a client. He just came up to me after I
had given a speech.
Q291 Paul Flynn: We had last week
the head of Wellington School, which was founded for the orphans
of the Napoleonic War, 400 acres to serve this purpose. Very little
of their work is done except for people who are very rich anyway,
the pupils that they get there. What should we do? Is it not about
time to refine the purposes and, if people are drifting miles
off what their intended charitable purpose was, is to take their
charitable status away from them?
Mr Lloyd: Not really. I think
the crucial thing is that there is a doctrine of charities called
si pre"s which comes from Norman French, meaning "as
close as", and if a charity is no longer fulfilling its charitable
purpose, eg, there are no orphans left over from the Napoleonic
War, you need to find some purpose which is analogous to it, contemporaneously
relevant in this modern era, and apply those charitable assets
for that. When you say take away the assets what do you actually
mean? Do you mean give them to the State, because that then is
a form of nationalisation?
Q292 Paul Flynn: I am not suggesting
we should be taking the assets away. What I am saying is there
is no correlation between the orphans of a war and the sons and
daughters of the richest sector of society.
Mr Lloyd: These two points there.
One is, are the original objects fit for purpose? If not, they
need to be looked at. When they are then revised, that organisation
should ensure that it delivers appropriate public benefit. Fundamentally,
though, I would say, listening to all this argument, that there
is this crucial issue with charity law, is that charities were
never set up exclusively to benefit the poor. There are charities
to benefit the poor. They are called poverty charities, but there
are 12 other heads of charity and in the last head there are an
awful lot of other things as well, like the promotion of army
messes and things like this which have charitable purposes, which
are not necessarily related to poverty. If you want to impose
a poverty test on all charitable purposes, that is a perfectly
legitimate point but the law needs to be changed to address that
because that is not what the law says at the moment.
Q293 Paul Flynn: What is the most
useful thing this Committee can do in our report?
Mr Lloyd: From my own point of
view, I think that the most useful thing this Committee can do
would be to broadly endorse the approach that the Charity Commission
is taking because I think it is grappling with, as I said earlier,
a change in the law as a result of the 2006 Act, and we are not
quite sure what it means, and it is inching along the frontiers
of the law in doing that. If you ask me a political question,
say, what should we do to reform charity law so it more closely
accords with perhaps what I imply from your questions you think
it should do, that is a completely different matter, and you need
to take that to the floor of the House. It is not for the Charity
Commission to do it.
Q294 Mr Walker: Ruth Jarratt, personally
I am not a great fan of opera but that does not mean I am not
very glad that we have it. I think its aspirations are far more
noble than those of ghastly Big Brother that we have on
television Channel 4, which is horribly nihilistic and does not
serve society in any way. Clearly opera means a lot to a lot of
people, my wife being one of them, but you mentioned that you
want to make it more accessible and I think that is a good thing.
It is based in London. Do you bring schools down from Liverpool,
Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, to see performances? Do you go
and reach into the far corners of the United Kingdom to bring
people down to London?
Ms Jarratt: That is both a very
interesting question and an issue we wrestle with because we want
to be, and the phrase we use is "a resource to the nation",
and we would like to be doing something in every city in the country
but we cannot afford to, so we have to by and large focus a bit
geographically. We tend to focus at any one time in a number of
areas outside London, in some cases way outside London, to get
some depth. What we have found is that it is better to do some
work over a period of years, to get to know the teachers, to bring
them into things, to do some repeat activity, than just to dip
in and out or force schools to dip in and out, so we will tend
to do some intense work for a period in a particular area or region.
We will take work out, we will set up big screens, we will work
with schools, we will work with teachers, etcetera. That is how
we operate.
Q295 Mr Walker: I take it that nothing
beats being there. Taking children who have nothing, very little
joy, very little beauty in their lives, and putting them in the
Opera House for some amazing performance can change lives, more
so, than seeing it on the big screen can. Politicians have a really
good habit of screwing things up but I do believe that there is
a role for the Department for Culture Media and Sport, as it is
called now, to make sure that although culture tends to be London-centric
in many ways because it is the capital city there is the resource
in place to ensure that everyone in this nation gets to enjoy
the benefits of, for example, your Opera House, regardless of
where they live because it is some of their tax money that is
going to support it. Would you be hostile to that?
Ms Jarratt: That is what we are
aiming for all the time. One has to be realistic. There are only
so many days in a year, even with days when we do two performances,
and there are only 2,260 seats in the Opera House. Therefore,
I cannot do the numbers off the top of my head, but I do not know
if we can keep up with the growth in the population. What we want
to do and what we aim continually is to bring more people through
our doors every year, but we have to be realistic. We are only
one building and so, that is why we look at other methods as well,
and indeed because for some people that is, arguably an easier
experience. But, I have to agree with you that there is a double
experience. There is seeing the show and there is being in the
building. It is an amazing building. It was set up, as I say,
to do what it was meant to do. With the rebuilding, partly with
public money, it is a fantastic and genuinely uplifting experience
to come, and the fact that people will often get dressed up in
their best clothes to come I think shows how much it means to
them.
Q296 Mr Walker: To be there seeing
a show?
Ms Jarratt: Yes, so we do what
we can with the financial model.
Q297 Mr Walker: What is the real
price of a ticket? You have tickets ranging from £210 to
£30.
Ms Jarratt: We do £6, £8
or £10.
Q298 Mr Walker: What is the real
price of a ticket? What is the cost to you of a ticket? Is it
£150, £350? What is the actual cost of each seat in
the Opera House if you were just to throw it open?
Ms Jarratt: I suppose you would
have to take the total turnover, which last year was
£90 million, remove any of the ancillary
activity like education, young people's programmes and so on,
and I am not quite sure what number that would bring you to, and
then divide by the number of performances and seats. I have never
tried to do that equation.
Q299 Mr Walker: Is it something that
you should do? You should be able to price the real price of each
seat.
Ms Jarratt: The real cost?
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