Speeches by Bryant.

“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.”

“They are all part of the equation, and I am having a bit more of the conversation here now with them.”

“The ticketing websites? Obviously, that takes us on to the secondary ticket market as well. There is a whole series of questions. I noticed the questions that were asked previously that we may want to address, and some of the conversations that we are having with them have been slightly more fraught in relation to whet…”

“Keep calm, and do not get too frustrated with the charity commissioners. They have an important job to do to make sure that everybody understands their responsibilities that they take on as a trustee. However, you do have to dot the I’s and cross the T’s. You cannot take shortcuts when it comes to getting all of this r…”

“If it loses any element of credibility, people are going to start saying, “Well, I am not going to sign up to this”.”

“And in many ways struggling as well.”

“They had better do and, to be honest, we have had such constructive conversations since I took on the role and on the back of our response to your Committee report, and I think on a couple of occasions Dame Caroline has asked me questions in the Chamber—and others have—about whether we would implement legislation. We a…”

“I am already going to Diana Ross.”

“I am also going to the Scissor Sisters, and you will be shocked to hear I am going to see Kylie. But I think the Kylie tour was all organised long before this and I am sure we should be so lucky, but Kylie might arrange another tour, and when she has another tour I hope she will sign up too. Should we stop this now?”

“Stop in the name of love.”

“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.”