Rising costs are pushing theatre tours out of UK towns 

Theatre leaders urge the Chancellor to use the Autumn Budget to ensure greater access to culture for communities throughout the UK. 

Theatre companies are being forced to cut towns and venues from tour routes as rising costs make more dates financially unviable, the sector has warned. 

From pantomime to Shakespeare, from major musicals to community-led productions, theatre brings culture, creativity and shared experiences to communities across the country.  Theatre is more popular than ever, with SOLT & UK Theatre member venues welcoming more than 37 million attendances last year. Those audiences bring vital footfall to high streets across the country: for every £1 spent on a theatre ticket, a further £1.40 is spent locally in restaurants, shops, and pubs. 

Touring is essential to making theatre accessible to everyone, everywhere. Audiences broadly mirror the national population due to the variety of work that can reach towns and cities across the country. Yet sharply rising travel, freight, energy and business rates costs, alongside higher National Insurance contributions, are now making visits to smaller and medium-sized towns increasingly unviable.  

The result is fewer routes and less choice for audiences. Domestic touring activity fell by 24% between 2019 and 2024, while touring plays and drama fell by 64%. More than half of the 571 touring organisations analysed in Arts Council England’s recent Touring Review recorded losses.  

SOLT & UK Theatre are therefore calling on the Chancellor to use three established mechanisms in the Autumn Budget to keep theatre touring, protect venues and support access to culture across the UK: 

1. Keep tours on the road: Make unavoidable touring transfer costs such as freight eligible for Theatre Tax Relief. Independent ACE-commissioned modelling shows targeted TTR reform can drive growth: a modelled expansion would generate an estimated £4.50 in GVA for every £1 of gross Exchequer cost. 

2. Fix the opera and ballet gap: Reduce the touring-rate threshold for opera and ballet to reflect the reality of large-scale national touring. 

3. Protect live performance venues: Extend the relief for pubs and live music venues to theatres and other live performance venues, protecting them from business rates shocks. 

SOLT & UK Theatre Co-CEOs Claire Walker and Hannah Essex said:  

“Theatre is one of the UK’s great success stories, and has the power to bring real economic and social value to every community. But without targeted action, more communities will lose opportunities to see theatre close to home, with fewer weeks of work for skilled professionals, and less footfall for local businesses. 

“These proposals are practical, affordable, and focused on the decisions that matter. They would help producers add dates, enable opera and ballet to reach more audiences, and give local venues greater confidence to programme ambitious work.  

“The Autumn Budget is an opportunity to keep theatre touring on the road, protect live performance venues and ensure more people can enjoy world-class performance in the communities where they live.” 

Leaders from across the sector added: 

Kate Varah, Executive Director and Co-Chief Executive of the National Theatre:  

“Touring is the most direct way to ensure that the world-class theatre the UK is renowned for reaches communities across the country. Research shows a staggering decline of 64% in the number of plays touring nationally since 2019, and this collapse puts our theatre infrastructure and ecosystem, and the local cultural economies supported, at risk. Without intervention, communities across the country will be deprived of theatre that reflects their lives and experiences and that brings audiences together. 

“Expanding Theatre Tax Relief to account for some of the specific costs associated with touring would be transformative. This low-cost intervention would unlock greater national access to the arts, support jobs and local economies, and give producers the confidence to invest in ambitious new work for audiences across the country. Most importantly, it would deliver the government’s intention to make the arts more accessible in every part of the country.” 

Laura Canning, General Director & CEO, Opera North: 

“The brutal reality of the economics of touring is that they no longer stack up. Theatres are struggling for shows, and producing companies are desperate to find ways to take work to their audiences. However, Opera North may need to take 150 or more people on the road to deliver our larger-scale activity which means, while we may sell out our theatres, we can’t possibly cover our costs. 

“Bringing travel, accommodation and transport costs into the scope of Theatre Tax Relief would be, well, exactly that: the relief across the sector would be instant. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it could be the difference between thriving and dying. We could expand our touring horizons, rather than shrink them; add new venues, take a broader range of repertoire on the road, and invest in family shows or community activity for every postcode. At the same time, we would bring significant economic investment to the restaurants and hotels in those areas, inspire local school children to consider different careers, employ more specialist and local labour, and bring joy and better well-being to local communities. Since it was introduced, Theatre Tax Relief has incentivised activity rather than just existence – now is the time to focus on incentivising touring, to ensure audiences are served wherever they live.” 

Tom de Keyser, Founder & CEO, ROYO Group: 

“Since ROYO was founded in 2020, we have grown into one of the UK’s largest producers of commercial musicals, employing over 500 freelancers each year and taking productions across the UK and internationally. Yet the economics of UK touring are moving in the wrong direction. Tours that once ran for 40 to 45 weeks now run for 26 to 30, with smaller towns often the first to lose out.  

“If the Government wants growth to reach every part of the country, productions must be able to reach every part of the country. Making transport and transfer costs eligible for Theatre Tax Relief would unlock investment, extend tours, generate jobs, and bring more audiences into town centres.” 

Richard Winkler, Winkler & Smalberg: 

“Dawn Smalberg and I (together, Winkler & Smalberg) are an international producing team proud to have worked with the National Theatre on The Lehman Trilogy, The Motive and the Cue, Dear England, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Standing at the Sky’s Edge, among others. We invest in UK productions because they are first-class artistically, responsibly produced, and, thanks to Theatre Tax Relief, increasingly more attractive economically. That combination is why we’ve built our UK presence over the past five years, and why we’re currently partnering on productions including Arcadia, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, RENT, The Cherry Orchard, and The Lives of Others, alongside our investment in Inter Alia’s transfer and Broadway run. 

“But touring is where the case for TTR expansion is clearest. In the US, touring is a fundamentally more secure investment because the system includes weekly guarantees; the UK has no equivalent, which makes it far harder to bring investors to the table for touring productions specifically. Extending TTR to cover the additional costs unique to touring wouldn’t just level that playing field, it would unlock significantly more private investment in UK tours, from us and from our US and other international investors outside the UK.”