47 MPs sign grassroots comedy letter to Lisa Nandy

Sixteen MPs wanted to put their names on the Live Comedy Association’s letter to the Culture Secretary and weren’t allowed to. Parliamentary protocol, apparently, which is a sentence that has ended more good intentions than any heckler. That quirk is why two different numbers are attached to the same story. Chortle led on 47 signatures when the letter went public on 1 September. The LCA’s own announcement puts the total backing at over 60 once you count the ones who couldn’t sign.

The letter went to Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, and it makes five asks. Recognise grassroots live comedy within creative industries and cultural policy alongside grassroots live music. Include the sector in discussions around VAT on tickets, business rates reform and support for freelancers. Support independent research into the size, economic contribution and regional distribution of the live comedy sector. Explore extending the live music arena levy model to include live comedy. Consider undertaking a fan-led review of grassroots live comedy and its long-term sustainability. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we covered the campaign back in June. The LCA was then asking comedy fans to email their own MPs through a template form built with the Night Time Industries Association. Three months of pre-written emails, and 47 names came back on the paper.

Which MPs signed the grassroots comedy letter?

Forty-seven, per Chortle, and the named ones make a properly strange bill: Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader; Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Chancellor; John Whittingdale, who ran the culture department for the Conservatives; and Hannah Spencer, the Greens’ culture spokesperson. The LCA’s own write-up adds Richard Quigley, who chairs the Comedy All-Party Parliamentary Group, and Alex Cole-Hamilton, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. You wouldn’t book those six on the same night, not without a very good MC and a clear route to the fire exit, and yet all six have put their name to the idea that a room above a pub with a mic stand belongs in the same policy paragraph as one with a drum kit.

Jessica Toomey, the LCA’s chair, tied the timing to the parliamentary calendar rather than to anything happening in the sector:

“The support we are receiving from politicians from across the political spectrum is fantastic and the timing of the publication of this letter is crucial.”

She went on: “Today MPs return to Westminster after the summer recess and our campaign continues to get grassroots live comedy officially recognised alongside live music.” The LCA also hung the launch on Edinburgh. The Fringe, it said, “began with Edinburgh Comedy Awards producer Nica Burns also calling for live comedy to be recognised by government”. It “ended with Richard Gadd (writer and star of global Netflix show Baby Reindeer) saying, ‘it’s high time government acknowledges comedy’.” Gadd is a useful name to have on your side in a press release. He is not, on the evidence of the last two years, an especially reliable indicator of what happens to the twelve-seat room in Kilburn.

The only ask with a number attached is the arena levy

Four of the five asks are requests to be included in a conversation. The fifth is a costed mechanism that already exists in another artform, with a rate and a threshold attached to it. The LIVE Trust’s grassroots music levy is a voluntary £1 per ticket on shows over 5,000 capacity. In January 2026, Music Week reported its first distribution: £500,000, placed with music industry organisations that could spend it quickly.

Mirror that across comedy and the arithmetic is not complicated, though the pool is a lot shallower. Comedy’s 5,000-plus rooms are a short list. A lot of what fills them is a handful of touring names playing the O2 and the Utilita Arena in Birmingham (whose car park, if you have ever tried to leave it after a show, is its own act of endurance comedy). A comic doing two arena nights at 10,000 a night generates £20,000 for the pot under the same rules. That is real money to a grassroots comedy circuit where the average UK comedian earned £21,143 in 2025, down £5,635 on the year before. It is also, notably, voluntary, which in live music has meant a lot of public prodding of the biggest promoters before anyone actually pays.

A select committee asked for the same things in August 2025

None of this week’s coverage put the letter next to the one that went before it. On 5 August 2025, Dame Caroline Dinenage, chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, wrote to Sir Chris Bryant. Bryant was then the minister for creative industries, arts and tourism. She asked for formal recognition of live comedy as a distinct art form, plus increased engagement from DCMS and Arts Council England. She also wanted a roundtable between ministers and live comedy professionals, the roundtable being Whitehall’s smallest available unit of interest, and consideration of a voluntary grassroots levy for the biggest venues. The committee’s own words on that last point were blunt. The letter said there was “a strong case for the biggest venues, producers and promoters to voluntarily mirror the grassroots music levy.” Toomey called it “a landmark moment for UK live comedy” at the time.

Thirteen months on, the same asks are being routed through a different door. This time there are 47 signatures behind them, and the letter is addressed to the Secretary of State rather than a minister. The committee’s letter followed its State of Play session on the condition of live comedy earlier in 2025. MPs there heard that differences in infrastructure, workforce and audiences had effectively shut comedy out of the funding bodies that other performing arts use. That makes twice, formally, that Parliament has been told, and in the gap between the two tellings Underbelly Boulevard is breaking its Soho lease in January and comedy clubs were left out of the 20 per cent business rates cut handed to pubs, social clubs and live music venues.

Nobody can say how many comedy rooms Britain has

The third ask is the dull one and it’s the one everything else waits on. Independent research into the size, economic contribution and regional distribution of the sector. The figure everyone quotes, including me, is that live comedy is worth more than £1 billion to the UK economy. That number comes from the LCA, which has around 1,500 members and an obvious interest in the answer. Their maths may well be sound. But when a Treasury official asks who counted, “we did” lands a good deal softer than a commissioned study with somebody else’s name on the cover. The request for one has been sitting in front of DCMS since last summer.

The same measurement gap runs through the other proposals landing on Parliament’s desk this year. That includes the suggestion that comedy bookers might need a £10 licence. You cannot licence, levy or rate-relieve a sector you haven’t counted. Grassroots comedy has spent a decade being described in adjectives. The letter’s fourth and fifth asks both quietly depend on somebody finally producing a spreadsheet.

Sources

One small thing I’d like answered before the next round of letters. Which sixteen MPs were blocked by protocol, and what exactly was the protocol? The LCA hasn’t named them and Chortle didn’t ask. Sixteen names, one unexplained rule, and a total that gets repeated as “over 60” every time anybody quotes it.

See more from us in Google

About River Leanox

River Leanox edits Open Comedy's newsroom. Coverage runs across stand-up's full ecosystem: comics on the rise, club owners booking the rooms, festivals, specials, and the working-comic economics behind the laughs. Tips, corrections, and counter-arguments welcome at river@opencomedy.com.

View all posts

47 MPs sign the grassroots comedy letter, 16 more couldn’t