A private box at the Royal Albert Hall is being offered for sale with a guide price of £3m.
The so-called “grand tier” box, which includes 12 seats, offers some of the best views in the venue, according to the agents brokering the sale.
The lease on the box, which runs for a further 843 years, enables the owner to access about two-thirds of the events in the hall over the course of the year in return for an annual contribution to the charity of £13,795.
“Whether purchasing as a business or an individual, a rare box at the Royal Albert Hall will amaze your guests,” says the brochure, produced by the agency Berkshire Hathaway Homeservices.
Agents say it is the first time in the hall’s more than 150-year history that this box has been offered for sale.
It comes as the hall is trying to pass legislation through parliament to amend its constitution so it can, among other things, add an additional two seats in the grand tier boxes that contain 10.
The hall requires an act of parliament because it was established by royal charter and needs parliamentary approval to make changes to its constitution.
The plan has been widely criticised by peers in the House of Lords because of concerns that the charity’s governance arrangements give rise to significant unmanaged conflicts of interest.
The hall’s construction was partly financed by selling 1,276 of its 5,272 seats to private investors in 1866.
Ownership of seats, inherited or traded over the years, provides membership of the Corporation of the Arts and Sciences (the formal name of the hall) and gives owners tickets for those seats to most events in the venue.
Seat-holders can do what they like with tickets for their seats, including using them, giving them to friends or charities, returning them to the box office to be sold at face value, or selling them on the open market.
The rise of ticket reselling websites has enabled seat-holders to sell tickets at prices far above face value.
Earlier this year, tickets for an Ed Sheeran concert at the hall with a face value of £200 were being offered on the resale site Viagogo for £5,899, almost 30 times their original price.
This was despite Sheeran’s management team writing to seat-holders urging them to resell their tickets at face value in order that regular fans could afford to attend.
The 329 seat-holders elect 18 people from among themselves, plus a president, to a 24-strong council, which acts as its trustee board.
This means seat-holders elected to the council can, by setting guidelines and influencing the choice of events through the programming and marketing committee, make decisions that might affect the open market price of their tickets.
The Conservative peer Lord Harrington of Watford, who is a government-appointed trustee of the Royal Albert Hall and is promoting the bill in the House of Lords, told peers during a debate about the bill in October he would “disapprove most strongly” if some additional seats had already been allocated and sold.
But a spokesperson for the hall said this week that under previous schemes, two additional seats were offered for sale in each box without any voting or membership rights attached.
This offer was taken up in six cases, including the one that is being offered for sale, the spokesperson said.
“This leaves 24 boxes still with 10 seats in them,” they said. “The bill would authorise the hall to offer for sale two seats in these boxes with membership and voting rights, i.e. 48 seats in all.
“They have not been allocated. To suggest otherwise is to confuse them with the previous sales.”