NEVER STANDING STILL
Martin Fullard meets Mark Taylor , CEO of London ’ s QEII Centre , who has now confirmed that the House of Lords won ’ t be moving in and that yet more investment is needed
ark Taylor has been the CEO of the QEII Centre since 2013 , and in that time has overseen a transformation to create one of the most versatile venues in Westminster . Despite being government-owned , the venue was confronted with the same challenges as everywhere else during the pandemic , but also faced an uncertain future .
The House of Lords had been touted to move in temporarily – to
Mark Taylor at the QEII Centre the tune of a decade – while extensive repairs were made to the Palace of Westminster . However , that threat to the events business has abated , and the venue can push ahead with further improvements .
I sat down with Taylor to learn more .
MF : Can you give me a brief overview of how business recovered in 2022 . How does your view of the next 12 months look like ? MT : The business has recovered incredibly rapidly . March was strong , April was stronger , May was the second biggest we ’ ve had in our history and June was the third biggest we ’ ve had in the history of the business .
We are currently about 9 % up on our budget for 2022 / 23 . We ’ ve already achieved room hire target for the year , which is unheard of .
There ’ s an awful lot of bounce back that ’ s happened very quickly .
We ’ ve seen internationals return promptly as well . We had a big American tech client that came in April , which was terrific in drawing people from all over Europe – we thought the war in Ukraine was going to impact that , but it didn ’ t . Then we had events such as Education World Forum , which had 1,000 delegates from 116 countries , 112 ministers that were on site , and we were only in May and it was like “ what is Covid-19 ?”. The organisers , a month before , said they were going to have onsite testing , but by the time the event got here , testing was not a certainty . We had all these people who were talking to each other saying , “ I have just come from my country , and now I ’ m in a room with 1,000 people and there ’ s no masks , which was great .” It seems to have really sort of passed .
MF : To what do you attribute this boom in business ; is it because there was so much pent-up demand after the pandemic ? MT : There was pent-up demand . But I think that there ’ s just this huge enthusiasm to return to live events . Across the production side , we ’ re seeing clients wanting to do more cameras , more screens , more presenters .
I suppose what ’ s hanging over us is a possible recession and what that might do . I think that part of the difficulty is that the corporate sector has been slightly slower to return . Delegate numbers are down www . conference-news . co . uk