It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell, and it is also a pleasure to be part of this cross-party supergroup this morning, which has got together to work across party lines and to argue for proper insurance indemnity for events this year from the Government.
I thank the Minister for her attendance, although, as the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine)—who, like me, is on the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee—has just said, we would really like to hear from the Treasury, because we would like to know what it has made of all the representations that have been made to it by the industries that we are talking about today. For fronting up for the Government time and again, the Minister deserves some kind of award, but we need to know the answers, and one wonders whether they are currently locked away in a vault somewhere across the road in the Treasury. We want to know what the Treasury really thinks.
As the hon. Member for Winchester did, I will focus today on festivals and live music events, but I will also say a little bit about theatre. I will not go through the whole set of statistics, as the hon. Members for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) and for Winchester have already done. Suffice it to say that one statistic for Cardiff is that across the river from my constituency, in the Principality Stadium, Ed Sheeran played four nights in a row in June 2018 to 60,000 people a night, which is nearly a quarter of a million people over the course of just a few nights. I do not need to spell out to hon. Members and to people watching this debate the economic impact of such events, and their importance to the economy of Cardiff and to the wider economy of south Wales.
In talking about festivals this morning, we want the Government to provide some clarity. If it is the case that it is not going to be possible for them to underwrite events and if it is going to be the case that they do not think that they will stick to their irreversible timetable and will probably have to impose further restrictions in the future, they should say so, because at the moment the sector is being led along on a string effectively and is unable to progress appropriately.
I have heard it said that the Government think that because festivals and live music events are selling tickets they do not need insurance, but of course normally—in a normal year—that ticket revenue would be used to do the build and provide the infrastructure to put on things such as festivals. However, this year is not a normal year, because festivals cannot get any cancellation insurance; they cannot get insurance against not being able to proceed, which would normally be available in the market, as the hon. Member for Winchester said. As a result, that money would have to be returned to ticket purchasers if the event was unable to go ahead and there would be a huge impact on those trying to put on festivals and also further down the supply chain.
That is why the hon. Gentleman—who, as I have said, is on the DCMS Committee, like me—was quite right to draw the attention of that Committee and of the Minister to the possibility of money being taken from people that will never be returned to them, and potentially fraudulent activity taking place around the festival scene this year without the kind of certainty that insurance provides. So we need either insurance to be underwritten for the sector to be able to restart or a clear indication that festivals will not be able to take place and financial support to allow the sector to survive into 2022.
Other countries are doing things about this situation.