It has been a year since we started to scrutinise the Bill, time during which much has changed, not least the Minister leading on it. As she can tell from today’s debate, she missed many treats during our debates, although I am not sure whether a repeat performance of the arguments made by the hon. Members for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) and for Shipley (Philip Davies) was what she intended to generate.
It has been a long journey and I pay tribute to all those Members who have sought to scrutinise and improve the legislation. Many debates have taken place to meet the test we set, as this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a nation that is on top of its rights and can play a full and active part in the market in both the public and private sectors. Labour certainly recognises that helping people to make the most of their money is vital in a country that is drowning in personal debt—£1.43 trillion of it. Little wonder that StepChange Debt Charity says that six out of 10 people in this country believe that politicians must do more in the next five years to help them stay out of financial difficulty. Making sure that they do not get ripped off should therefore be absolutely paramount in the work we do and in this Bill.
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley) and my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) for tabling the amendment and for their perseverance on ticket touting, which is a clear example of people being ripped off. I also want to pay tribute to the hon. Members for Bury North and for Shipley for their persistence in making their arguments and possibly making Friedrich Hayek spin in his grave through their interpretation of a free market. Let me deal with their arguments, because I think we will have to come back to them otherwise.
Few other markets would be characterised as free in which a limited number of sellers hoard a product, buying it up in bulk using underhand methods and then colluding to sell at hyped prices. Just because this is happening on the internet does not make it any different. One of the golden rules of the free market is that people should deal with each other honestly and require honesty in return, and that is clearly not what is happening in this industry. It is clearly not a free market. I am also delighted that both hon. Gentlemen outed themselves
as fans of St Trinian’s, because that can be the only explanation of why they believe that this is about spivs in pork-pie hats looking at the types of shoes people are wearing rather than a billion-pound ticket-touting industry that is damaging the pockets of fans of sport and music.
One reason we support the amendment tabled by the all-party group on ticket abuse and reject the Government’s call to reject the cross-party call from the Lords to address this issue is that we do not agree with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport that this is classic entrepreneurship, precisely because we know that it is not an open market. We know that botnets are hoovering up tickets the second they go on sale. Fans simply do not stand a chance.
Some estimates put the figure at 60% of tickets being taken up in this way. One expert looking at the sporting industry in the past year has identified around 30% of tickets being bought up in this way, so fans cannot click fast enough to beat the botnets. The Secretary of State challenged my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West and said:
“The interests that the hon. Lady is representing are probably those of the chattering middle classes and champagne socialists”—
I noted that the hon. Member for Shipley called me a socialist earlier; I have amended by Twitter biography accordingly, with his praise—
“who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman in the sale of a proper service.”—[Official Report, 21 January 2011; Vol. 521, c. 1187.]
This is no Flash Harry and this is no decent living.
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As my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) pointed out, ticket touting is connected to serious organised crime in this country, making around £40 million a year. The Metropolitan police said:
“The lack of legislation outlawing the unauthorised resale of tickets and the absence of regulation of the primary and secondary ticket market”
encourages this situation. Before the Deputy Speaker calls me to order and says that this is a debate not about the Serious Crime Bill but about consumer rights, let us look at the damage caused to consumers.
The hon. Member for Shipley quoted the Office of Fair Trading report, which is more than 10 years old. He was rather selective in what he quoted—perhaps we should say the primary marketing rather than secondary marketing of this report—so let us look again at the report. It did indeed say that
“secondary agents can provide a useful function”
for consumers, but it also
“found evidence of a number of secondary agents who deliberately mis-sell or defraud consumers”
and do not follow the golden rule of the free market.
That is why it is not uncommon to see tickets with a face value of £70 being sold for up to £1,200 on sites such as StubHub. All 20,000 tickets for Monty Python’s reunion performance—I am sure the hon. Member for Shipley would love to have gone and seen the Knights Who Say “Ni!”, as he says it so often himself—sold out in three quarters of a minute, only to reappear on the secondary market at more than 15 times their face value. Tickets for the reunion gig of the Stone Roses at
Heaton Park, something that many of us had only dreamed of for many years, were advertised at more than £1,000 only minutes after they had sold out. Their original face value was £55.
For the avoidance of doubt, nobody is saying that there should not be a secondary ticket market. All of us have experienced the frustration of buying tickets, only to find at the last minute that we could not go. I freely admit that the first time I ever pleaded with the Whips to have the night off was when I had bought tickets for the Wedding Present at KOKO and feared that I would not be able to go and see them. I was not able to go and see the Wonder Stuff because of a last-minute change to sitting hours in this place. We all recognise that a secondary ticket market is necessary in such circumstances, because it is difficult for fans to get a refund at short notice. That does not mean that we should give the commercial touts a free ride, especially when they distort the prices.
It takes a lot for us in the House to say that Russell Brand’s management is getting something right, but they were among the signatories to the letter that we saw this weekend from event organisers and people across the political spectrum and across the industry, saying that we needed to take on the issue and introduce transparency. [Interruption]. The hon. Member for Shipley says from a sedentary position that we are talking about more money for Russell Brand. We on the Opposition Benches are absolutely not committed to that. What we are committed to is people not paying over the odds to see Russell Brand, were they that way inclined—[Interruption.] That seems to have the unanimous support of the House.
The proposals before us are a sensible way of addressing the problem. The amendment may look long, but its purpose is simple—to let fans who are buying from a secondary site know what they are buying, such as whether the ticket includes a hospitality package or not. Let us look at the egregious information that the hon. Members for Shipley and for Bury North think we should not have: the name and address of the seller of the ticket, the location of the ticket being sold, so that they are not sold a ticket for a seat behind a pillar, the face value of the seat, and the terms and conditions.
We have been trying to make progress on this issue for a number of months. We tabled amendments similar to the Lords amendment. The Government did not support these amendments because they argued that the scale of the problem was only 10% of the market and that it was a matter for trading standards or the Advertising Standards Authority. They also said that the information in the amendment should already be available to consumers and that it was part of the consumer contracts regulations—the replacement for the distance selling regulations.
That is why I was surprised to see the letter that appeared in my inbox today at 4.30 from the Minister, saying that she had written to trading standards, asking them to look into the issue. It was her colleague, the right hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott), who first raised the point on 13 February last year. It seems a curious timing to say that there might be an answer in existing legislation. I was also interested to see the letters that the Minister put forward from the companies, offering to uphold the existing regulations, as though it was a great concession to do what the law
currently requires. They have said before that they would do so. One suggestion was that specifying the face value on the ticket would be the way forward. Fans buying from secondary sites would then know by how much they were being ripped off—what a wonderful concession to make in this market!
If the Government are committed to transparency and if they say that consumers should already have the information as a result of the distance selling regulations, I do not understand why they oppose a cross-party proposal for transparency in pricing. I hope they will at least support the proposal from the all-party group to enhance that protection and to ensure that there is a secondary ticket sales market by making sure that it is not possible to cancel a ticket just because it is offered for resale at face value. We know that the amendment will improve the legislation. Tackling ticket touting has been discussed for a year. We are in the year of the rugby world cup. Fans cannot wait any longer for the Government to see what is in their interest, make progress on this issue and ensure a freer market with informed consumers, not consumer capture, which I am sure Friedrich Hayek would have been concerned about.
It comes down to this: is the Minister on the side of organisations such as the England and Wales Cricket Board, UK Music and—dare I say—Mumford & Sons? Or is she on the side of Waldorf and Statler and the hon. Members for Shipley and for Bury North? I know which way my constituents would like the Minister to vote. I hope that others across the House who recognise that it is time to tackle the problem of ticket touting will vote with us.