British MPs have been accused of failing to learn their lesson over freebies after taking almost £400,000 of hospitality to concerts, sport matches and other events this year, with Louise Haigh, Lucy Powell and Wes Streeting among those accepting tickets. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Despite the outcry in 2024 over Keir Starmer accepting football tickets and gifts of clothing, MPs appear to have been declaring hospitality since the start of the year on a greater scale than previously seen.
The most recent disclosures include £858 worth of tickets to a Harry Styles concert at Wembley from the PRS for Music industry group, which was accepted by Powell, the deputy leader and education secretary. And Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, accepted tickets to the Chelsea flower show from Lloyds Banking Group worth £1,839.
Haigh also accepted a £1,314 ticket to the Ivor Novello awards, while Anneliese Midgley, the chief whip, enjoyed Brit Awards hospitality for two worth £3,432, hospitality at Cheltenham festival horse racing from the betting company Flutter worth £350, and tickets to the Grand National valued at £560. All were backbench MPs while accepting the hospitality and have now been elevated to cabinet jobs under Andy Burnham.
Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, accepted £1,480 of tickets to the men’s Wimbledon singles final while in her cabinet job, while Ellie Reeves, the attorney general, accepted a £1,314 ticket to the Ivors while solicitor general.
Burnham declared hospitality worth about £6,000 this year – mostly relating to his former role as the mayor of Greater Manchester, such as £3,800 tickets to the Brit Awards in Manchester, but also £500 worth of tickets to Ladies’ Day at the Grand National in Aintree.
The acceptance of free hospitality by MPs appeared to fall after mid-2024 when the spotlight fell on Starmer’s string of free tickets to watch Arsenal football games. In March 2025, Rachel Reeves, the then chancellor, said she would not accept free concert tickets again after she was criticised for using free tickets to take a family member to see Sabrina Carpenter at the O2 arena. She defended the decision on security grounds but said she would not do it again because she understood “how people feel about it”.
At the time, another government minister, Matthew Pennycock, said he had accepted “zero” free concert tickets as he personally did not think it was appropriate. “If I want to go to a concert at the O2, I’ll pay for it. But individual MPs, individual ministers, make their own decisions,” he said.
The value of free tickets being accepted by MPs was at about £300,000 a year in 2025, according to the Times last December. But this appears to have increased, with almost £400,000 of complimentary tickets, hospitality and other gifts having been declared between January and July this year – not including foreign trips.
Sue Hawley, the director of Spotlight on Corruption, suggested MPs should consider whether they should accept free tickets. “Some ministers and MPs appear to have short memories of the freebie-gate scandal that engulfed the first few months of Starmer’s time in No 10,” she said.
“Showering MPs and ministers with gifts and hospitality is a tried and tested lobbying tactic by big business and foreign governments. There is no good reason why elected officials should be accepting jaunts and tickets to events that have nothing to do with their parliamentary or constituency business.”
Duncan Hames, the director of policy at Transparency International UK, added: “Just because something is permitted it is not necessarily appropriate. MPs should be clear-eyed about why these invitations are really being offered. Before accepting hospitality, they should stop to consider what the company might be hoping to gain and what the public will make of it.”
The scale of the declared hospitality may have gone up partly because ministers have become more consistent about declaring hospitality on the MPs’ register, after Starmer changed the rules around transparency. Previously, some ministers declared the value of their free tickets on the MPs’ register and some only put it on the quarterly ministerial register without showing a value if they could argue it was connected to their government job.
Now both registers are updated at least monthly and have to show how much the hospitality or gifts were worth. Ticket prices have also risen, with many consumers complaining about the unaffordable costs of going to events.
Under the updated ministerial code, the last government set out a “well-established and recognised rule that ministers should not accept any gifts, hospitality or service which would, or might reasonably appear to, compromise their judgment or place them under an obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence their work in government”.