Speeches by Bryant.

“Sorry, say that again. I am slightly deaf and this a really difficult room in which to hear, so if you could bellow, that would be very helpful, Dame Caroline.”

“That is what not what Tom Cruise told me last night.”

“Well, in the words of Harry Styles, we are pleasing, never perfect, so I would prefer us to have achieved a lot more by now. However, I said in my letter to you—in I think November last year—that we hoped to make substantial progress by the first quarter of 2025 and we have made substantial progress. That is good. But …”

“We have said that we want it to be a voluntary levy because it is quicker to achieve. As you know, anything that requires statute takes forever and a day. I do not know when the next King’s Speech is going to be, so I do not know when we would be able to legislate. I do not think we would be able to do it by secondary …”

“Probably not, is the honest truth, for the reason that I just said. There might be an individual artist from overseas or whatever who might want to say, “If there is a charitable donation coming from me from my gigs it is going to go to the Amazon rainforest” or whatever it may be, and I would want to honour that. My g…”

“They are all part of the equation as well, and of course there is a lot of interaction between all the various parts of the ecosystem, and we are talking to them too.”

“Well, it ends up being the whole package in a sense, because for anybody just putting together a tour—there are lots of other things that affect tours in particular, particularly big stadium tours, many of which I have addressed in different arena, including the issue of whether they can tour in Europe and things like …”

“Live Nation could sign up 100% and help in relation to Ticketmaster, but also in relation to any of the acts that it is representing. I don’t know whether Alastair wants to add anything to that.”

“No, I would prefer to see more than a million by the end of the year partly because I want to see more tours happening in the UK, and this is not the only part of the equation for that. Also, I want to see more money going into the funds because some of this is urgent. We cannot hang around. There are several areas whe…”

“As I said earlier, I hope that some money might be going out before the end of the year, but I do not want to hurry them so fast that the trust ends up losing trust, if you see what I mean, because I think that that would be counterproductive in the long term. Festina lente is my Latin tag, which would be hasten slowly…”

“If we had not been able to write to you jointly yesterday to say where we had got to, I would have been very cross and I would be saying, “Right, I am looking at legislation, can we start drafting it?” But we have not got there, and I am very optimistic that this is going to work. I think it has been a good idea. There…”

“Saying that we took it down from 70% to 40% is one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that there was going to be a complete cliff edge, which was that it was coming to an end, and we were able to say, “No, we are coming in with a new rate” and that that is protected. I hope that we will be able to say some…”

“That is one way of explaining what happened. Another version is that everybody was going to be facing 100%, and that is not what they are now facing because we brought in something that we hope will be more permanent in relation to business rates. The point is well made. I know lots of people who work in hospitality, a…”

“I do not know what you mean precisely by “pushed under”. Do you mean a company that has already closed? Obviously what happens in the future is not going to deal with something that has already closed.”

“This has been a trajectory over the last few years, obviously. Certainly, if we had had the cliff edge that was threatened in relation to business rates, I think you would have seen considerably more businesses close. I am also the Tourism Minister, and there is a whole series of issues and challenges that face a lot o…”

“Sorry, can I just go back on one other point? Sorry, Dame Caroline, there is one other point I should perhaps make, which is that—again I have said this in the Chamber, but I will say this again here—I do not think for an instant that the creative industries are opposed to technological innovation or innovation of any …”

“Yes, although how they make people feel is part of the firepower, if you like. But yes, of course. The number of £124 billion of GVA is repeated by everybody, and quite rightly so, and there will probably be new numbers as well soon, which will probably be higher because this is a sector that is growing faster than any…”

“Those are obviously decisions for mayors rather than for us. I know both of them obviously and I think both of them had done an extraordinary job, although some of the media criticised them quite aggressively. The night-time economy is an important part of what people come to the UK for. One of the great delights as a …”

“There could. In a sense, that is what the agent of change principle is seeking to do. As I said earlier, that is why we are considering the question of whether or not we should put that into statute. Incidentally, I am a great fan of Amy Lamé. I remember her when she used to run Duckie at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.”

“I was one of the people who signed up to getting the Royal Vauxhall Tavern listed because I thought that it was an important part of our cultural heritage.”