Accepting free concert tickets is “not appropriate”, the housing minister has said, in an apparent criticism of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who received tickets to watch Sabrina Carpenter.
Matthew Pennycook, the MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, whose constituency includes the O2 Arena, said he had accepted “zero” free tickets. Asked about Reeves’s decision to accept tickets to see the Espresso pop star, he said: “I think that’s a decision for individual MPs.”
But when asked by LBC why he would not accept tickets at his own constituency venue, Pennycook said: “Well, I don’t personally think it’s 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.
“I think the important thing is that everything is declared and above board, so individual people can make their choices as to whether they think it’s appropriate to take tickets on occasions. I personally haven’t done, as I said, at the O2 and wouldn’t do.”
A number of Labour MPs on the government payroll privately backed Pennycook’s comments but questioned whether it was right for the minister to publicly criticise the chancellor.
Some senior Labour MPs also urged Reeves to donate the cost of the tickets to charity to draw a line under the story. “The optics of this. She’s making cuts to disability benefit spending and she can’t even even pay for it [the concert],” one said.
The tickets accepted by Reeves were worth £600, according to the MPs’ register of interests published on Friday.
Other MPs to accept hospitality recently included three MPs who accepted free tickets to Cheltenham races, among them the shadow environment secretary, Victoria Atkins, who recorded £450 in tickets.
The Conservative MP Caroline Dinenage declared more than £2,000 of fee Brit awards tickets, as did the Labour MP Patrick Hurley, whose tickets were worth more than £3,000 and Conservative MP Nusrat Ghani, whose hospitality was worth £1,400.
Oliver Dowden, the Conservative MP and former deputy prime minister, declared a £12,000 trip to San Diego to watch a football match courtesy of Tory donor Mohamed Mansour, a former Egyptian government minister.
Downing Street played down Pennycook’s comments and said he was speaking on his own behalf.
His comments were the second veiled criticism of Reeves after the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, said she was too busy to take freebies. She said she had “never accepted tickets to any concerts or anything like that” as an MP.
“I’ve got a very busy diary and I’ve got to prioritise my time and, you know, when I’ve got time off, actually spending some time with my family and my husband is actually a more attractive option to me,” she said.
Reeves told the BBC on Sunday she had accepted the hospitality at the concert because of security reasons. “I do now have security, which means it’s not as easy as it would have been in the past to just sit in a concert.”
She said it had been “the right thing to do from a security perspective” and that the value of the tickets would be declared. But she said the hospitality seats she had accepted were not those available for sale. “They weren’t tickets that you were able to buy,” Reeves said.
Keir Starmer has also defended taking Arsenal hospitality tickets because he was not able to use his old season ticket seats as a result of security.
No 10 has backed Reeves’s decision to accept the tickets and said ministers were free to make their own judgments. A spokesperson said: “The prime minister supports all of his ministers making their own judgments in relation to these matters as per the ministerial code.”
