I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate, and it is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), who is doing some great work in this area, formulating our policy for when we will hopefully be in government after the election. I am speaking in the debate in my capacity as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse and to support Lords amendment 104, which relates to the secondary ticketing market.
Before I begin, I reiterate that the sole purpose of the amendment is to protect British consumers from organised crime and to reduce the harm caused by the unlawful and exploitative activities of online ticket touts. Aspects of the amendment have already been recommended by the Competition and Markets Authority, which recognised back in 2021 that the UK needs stronger legislation to tackle the resale of tickets. It is not just me who has been banging on about this since forever—the CMA is also calling for it, having looked at the market for many years.
It has to be said that Lords amendment 104 will not come with any cost to the UK taxpayer either. If it fails to become law, the only beneficiaries will be scammers, fraudsters and the overseas websites that they operate from. So Members will be voting either in the interests of the British public or in the interests of ticket touts.
The Minister said in his opening remarks that all Opposition Members are doing is crowd-pleasing; I am sure I heard his words correctly. I think he will find that the crowd all have votes. This has been a fan-led campaign. Perhaps pleasing the crowd is not always a bad idea. We are here to represent the people, after all. For too long, this Government have allowed an online black market for ticket resale to thrive via websites such as Viagogo, StubHub, Gigsberg, Ticombo and Seatsnet. The public—the crowd, as the Minister called them—are sick to death of it.
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