Livingstone's bid to lure theatre-goers is '£350,000 failure'

An initiative by Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, to attract first-time theatre-goers to the West End has been a failure, the London Assembly's culture committee said yesterday. The £350,000 promotion was aimed at encouraging new and more diverse audiences but only 17 tickets of every 1,000 were bought by people attending theatre for the first time.

Nearly half the tickets were bought by people who already visit the theatre at least once a month, the committee said in a 38-page report assessing the Mayor's culture strategy. His initiative followed The Independent campaign, the Lister Experiment, in which leading producers offered cheaper seats to encourage new and younger audiences.

In Mr Livingstone's scheme, four out of five tickets were bought by white people. Asians accounted for 6.6 per cent of sales, Chinese took 4.5 per cent, but only 1.6 per cent of tickets bought by black people. Disabled and older people would not apply because of the timing of the shows, and because most theatres were in the West End, the report concluded.

The Mayor introduced two discount theatre-ticket initiatives – the first in the wake of 11 September and another this year – involving 70 shows such as Bombay Dreams, Chicago and My Fair Lady. Mr Livingstone declared the initiative, in which 49,000 tickets sold first time, with a further 79,000 this year, a "runaway success".

But the culture committee questioned whether it had been as successful as he claimed. There was no rigorous evaluation of the first promotion, The Greatest Show on Earth, although it received £250,000 from the Mayor's economic development agency and was supported by free bus tickets from Transport for London, the committee said. And although this year's initiative did appeal to young people, they were concerned that the Mayor had invested thousands of pounds in promotions without proper evaluation of whether they have reached the target audience.

One of Mr Livingstone's key pledges in his culture strategy was "to make the arts more accessible to Londoners and celebrate cultural diversity". But Meg Hillier, the committee chair, said: "For the past two years, the theatre-ticket promotion has been marked by woolly objectives, an absence of rigorous evaluation and questionable claims of success.

"Without a fundamental re-examination of the promotion, we are concerned it risks becoming a 'feelgood' event which subsidises existing theatre-goers without contributing substantially to generating new audiences or supporting culture in other parts of London."

A spokeswoman for the Mayor said the statistics were taken with an online questionnaire from those who bought tickets online. But theatre managers believed first-time visitors were more likely to book by phone because they would have more queries, she said. Of those who bought tickets online, nearly half went to the theatre once a year or less and a quarter were under 25, which suggested the promotion was creating new audiences.