A crossbench committee of peers has urged the Royal Albert Hall to address the “impasse” with the Charity Commission over its governance arrangements.
A special report from the House of Lords Select Committee on the Royal Albert Hall Bill, published last week, says it wants to make the wider house and the government aware of issues around potential conflicts of interest “so that a way forward can eventually be found to address the concerns raised”.
It says: “The Royal Albert Hall plays an iconic part in the life of the nation and there is a strong public interest in ensuring that its governance arrangements are consistent with its charitable status.”
The commission has been trying for years to persuade the venue to change its governance arrangements, which the regulator views as giving rise to a conflict of interest.
This is because a majority of the hall’s trustee board is made up of people who own seats at the historic venue and who are able to make large sums from the sale of tickets they receive for events at the hall.
Seat-holders can do as they like with tickets for their seats, which are their private property: they can use them, give them to friends or charities, return them to the box office to be sold at face value, or sell them on the open market for the best price available.
But the seat-holders elected to the council are also in a position, by setting guidelines and influencing the choice of events through the programming and marketing committee, to take decisions that might affect the open-market price of their tickets.
The committee’s report says “an impasse has been reached” because the Royal Albert Hall is unwilling to make changes to its governance and the Charity Commission would like to do so but has been prevented from taking the matter forward.
The regulator has twice been refused permission by former Attorneys General to take a case to the charity tribunal to settle the matter.
But Victoria Prentis, the current incumbent of the post, said in a letter to the deputy speaker of the House of Lords that she regarded the Royal Albert Hall Bill, which has been put before parliament to make several changes to the hall’s constitution, as a “missed opportunity” to make changes to the charity’s governance arrangements.
She said: “It is widely acknowledged that the constitution of the Corporation of the Hall of Arts and Sciences [the formal name of the hall] gives rise to a potential conflict between the private interests of seat-holding trustees and the corporation’s charitable objects.
“This potential conflict is of significant concern to the Charity Commission and many well-informed observers.
“Indeed, I wrote last year to the president of the corporation to express my disappointment that more had not been done to resolve the conflicts issue in the many years of its existence.
“I therefore regard the bill as a missed opportunity to effect meaningful change to the arrangements by which the Royal Albert Hall is governed.”
The Royal Albert Hall did not provide a comment before publication of this article.