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 …”

“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 …”

“Yes. It is not easy setting up a new charity. Lots of us have done it as MPs and end up doing things in our own constituencies. I have myself. Obviously you want to make sure that the fiduciary responsibilities of trustees are adhered to. What is good is that quite a few people who have already signed up as trustees ar…”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I would not link the two, no.”

“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…”

“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 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…”

“My reading of how we responded to your report is slightly different. Yes, we disagreed about the fan-led review because I feel I am the fan-led review. I am a fan and also parts of the sector had already done their own fan-led review, which fed into the work that you produced. We wanted to proceed at pace rather than w…”

“It is not my Department.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“Stop in the name of love.”