I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) for her campaign on secondary ticketing and the need to protect consumers, and to the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley) for his consistency on this issue and, as someone who comes from the entertainment industry, for his very well-informed speech.
I must also pay tribute to Statler and Waldorf at the back of the Government Benches—if it was not unparliamentary, I would suggest that the hon. Members for Shipley (Philip Davies) and for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) were a couple of muppets. My question for them is: what kind of market would object to consumers being fully informed about a commodity at the time of purchase? Even if we applied the principles of the free market, we would not want to restrict information to consumers when they buy products.
The hon. Member for Shipley used the example of selling houses, but we would not sell someone a house without letting them look around it or without giving them all its specifications. Similarly, we would not sell someone a car saying, “We’ll only let you look at its left side,” or “We won’t let you look inside”; we have to give people all the information. There cannot be any objection to ensuring that consumers are fully informed.
The hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) intervened to ask about the resale of rugby tickets. He said that if tickets allocated within the rugby family were offered for resale on the secondary market, the rugby club found doing so would be banned from receiving any future allocation. The RFU went to court to obtain the information it needed in order to
regulate the sale of tickets in exactly that way. I therefore agree that such rules should apply, but rugby needs such information to make its own regulations stick. In seemingly agreeing with his colleague, the hon. Member for Bury North, the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire is actually agreeing with us.
The Olympics restricted the resale of tickets, which had to go back through the arrangements set up by London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games and be resold by Ticketmaster at face value. In the early stages, people complained about the fact that there were a lot of empty seats, but such tickets had to be recycled to ensure there was an atmosphere in the stadium. The process of making sure that the tickets went to family members or genuine fans successfully and memorably created a unique atmosphere within the Olympic stadium. That is remembered, particularly by the athletes who performed there, because we made sure that such tickets were made available at face value to genuine fans.
The RFU wanted to do exactly the same with its tickets for this year’s rugby world cup, but even before the tickets were made available, they could be bought for several thousands of pounds on secondary ticketing websites. The cheapest child’s ticket is £7 and the most expensive ticket is £700, but I saw—I will not name the website, because there are lots of them and it is wrong to single out one of them—five tickets on sale for £8,000 each, with a £3,000 handling charge.
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I asked the secondary ticketing company how it could sell tickets for £8,000, given that they were not yet available and that the ballot for them had not even happened. It could not really answer the question, but in my opinion someone in the rugby family who was going to get the tickets had put them up for resale. That underlines why people need information at the point of resale. The company told me, “Look, we provide a service. We stop those dodgy guys hanging around outside stadiums selling tickets in their camel hair coats. They look at the cut of your shoes to determine how much they reckon they can charge you for a ticket.” I asked what the £3,000 handling charge was for, and it said, “If you can pay £8,000 for a ticket, we think you can afford a £3,000 handling charge.” That is the equivalent of looking at someone’s shoes: the company looks at the amount on someone’s credit card and says, “You can pay £8,000, so you can bung us £3,000 for handling the tickets.” That is a complete and utter disgrace.
The point is that sports in particular, like the entertainment industry, want to ensure that tickets are available to core fans and that, within reason, no one is excluded on the grounds of price. Someone can be a genuine fan and not be able to afford £500 for test match tickets—they would be lucky to get a test match ticket for £500 on the secondary market—so it is vital for sports to make their matches accessible to fans and families to build their next generation of supporters.
The hon. Members for Shipley and for Bury North are apparently arguing that people should be priced out of going to matches. The sports of rugby, cricket and tennis wrote to the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), to express their concern that if the practice continued, they would be forced to put up
their prices. They say that they charge reasonable prices for tickets to make them accessible to all fans who support their sports, but that if money continues to be made on the secondary ticketing market, they might as well make that money by selling tickets at top prices and then put it into their sports. However, they are genuinely concerned about what that might mean for the future of their sports, because they will not be able to build a fan base among the whole community of those who want to support them and to go to matches, and their sport may dwindle as a result.
When the people who run sports set ticket prices, they have the future of their sport at heart. We cannot just say that the secondary ticketing market offers some sort of guarantee if there is something wrong with the ticket. For someone who has paid to go to a major international at a venue across the country, such arrangements will not pay back the cost of their travel or of staying overnight at a hotel, and they will certainly not get the experience that has been paid for in buying the ticket. People must have the information they need to make an informed decision about whether such tickets should be on sale in the first place, and whether they will actually get what they are promised when the ticket is offered for sale. We have heard the arguments against that and for letting the free market reign, but the market absolutely is not free.