Speeches by Bryant.

“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.”

“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…”

“It is not my Department.”

“I do not want any small music venues to close, and that is why we are working as fast as we possibly can on the levy. I think in the end that is going to make the single biggest difference. As I say, we are looking at whether or not the agent of change principle, which we think should be part of the equation now, shoul…”

“Most of the people I have spoken to have said, “Can we have a cut in VAT?” I have said, “You know that is going to be very difficult for us to achieve.” Then that is normally the end of the conversation. I am sure everybody would much prefer us to cut all their taxation, but we end up at the same point. The parallel of…”

“I am very happy to see anything anybody can bring to us, but it has to be very convincing to be able to say we are going to radically reform the VAT structure for one particular industry. My anxiety would be that the theatre industry would make exactly the same argument. You end up with an awful lot of parts of the cre…”

“I would not link the two, no.”

“We have had lots, and Alastair has had a lot of it, so I am going to hand over to Alastair for that. But the single point I make is it is unlikely that we would be able to persuade HMRC to change how VAT operates solely for this levy.”

“That is like me telling you what is going to be in my plan, and I am not publishing it here today. There is stuff I am working on still, so on the Creative Remuneration Working Group, which was set up under the previous Government, I think we are making significant progress. I would like the record labels to move close…”

“I am pretty focused on it, if I am honest. We have had quite robust conversations in some of the meetings I have been in about trying to make sure that we deliver on all of this. Some of this is not entirely within our gift, so the issues around creative education and music in schools is of course a DfE responsibility,…”