The difference is the name of the vendor, the booking reference and all that, which are not there on the original sale. At the heart of the argument is
the fact that, by placing all this extra regulation on the secondary market and making it more difficult to sell tickets, fewer people will choose to sell their ticket through what will eventually become a regulated market. That will result in people, or spivs as my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) called them, choosing to sell their tickets on the unregulated market—or the black market as it is known outside this place. That is likely to happen, and the result will be less, not more, consumer protection.
It was mentioned a moment or so ago in the context of the Paul Weller concert that someone was being asked to pay £101 for a ticket that had a face value of £38 and that somehow the “real” fans were being denied access to the concert. But no one has been able to explain why someone who is prepared to pay £100 for the right to attend and listen to a concert is any less of a real fan than someone who is prepared to pay £38. It just does not make any sense. Surely if a person is prepared to pay £100, they are equally likely to be a real fan as someone who is paying £38.
The hon. Member for Glasgow North West, who is leaving his place, talked about someone making false tickets in their bedroom or their office. That is already a criminal offence; it is fraud. We cannot make it any more of a criminal offence by passing more legislation. Those matters are already covered by criminal law, and the amendment before us will do nothing whatever to sort out criminal behaviour—those who set out deliberately to con and defraud members of the public. We have plenty of laws to deal with those people. The market is working well. To all those who say that they are standing up for the consumer, let me say that I am not inundated with lots of e-mails on this matter. I get hundreds of thousands of e-mails a year complaining about all sorts of things, but I do not get many from people saying, “Oh, I tried to get a ticket for this concert and I could not get it because they were all bought up.”