Today I want to speak in support of Lords amendment 104 and the Lords amendments relating to foreign state ownership of UK newspapers, and I will raise some questions about the Lords amendments relating to consumer protections against unfair subscription practices and the use of fake reviews. I will start by setting out my overall support for the Bill and establishing a bit of context for why it is so important to get the regulation of the digital economy right.
Over the past decade, our economy has obviously been transformed by digital change. In many ways this has brought benefits but, equally, it has brought new harms—new ways that unscrupulous individuals and companies can exploit us all. People in our communities are affected by the failures of existing digital regulation, and I would argue that it is often communities like mine that bear the brunt. In Newham we have significant digital exclusion, and massive damage has been caused to family finances by the cost of living crisis.
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It is all the more damaging for someone to be ripped off when their income barely manages to pay the bills already. It is more than that, because in times of stress and when people are working long hours to make ends meet, they hardly have the time or the energy to read through often opaque terms and conditions before purchasing. They are less likely to have the capacity to go and search for all the deliberate barriers that can be set up in order to find out how to cancel a subscription that is costing them dear. I have to say that, even with assistance from younger members of my family, I have personally failed to cancel a number of subscriptions that I was absolutely assured had gone. We have to get this right—not for me, but for others—so that people have the capacity to search for all the deliberate barriers that can be set up in order find out how to cancel their subscriptions.
This Bill and many of the Lords amendments make welcome progress on some of these issues. I will start with ticket touting, which, as we know, is one of the most egregiously exploitative practices. I think we can
all agree that it is simply wrong to buy tickets in bulk and then charge a huge mark-up fee for resale. It creates massive barriers to accessing culture, particularly for people on lower incomes, and the revenues go not to our hard-pressed musicians and venues, but to grifters who add absolutely no value of their own.