My Lords, very few secondary markets are perfect but they are certainly welcome in that they provide liquidity to the primary market. These amendments on secondary ticketing platforms would get in the way of the primary market. When somebody buys a ticket for an event, they are investing in something that is often way into the future. Tickets for big shows are often released a year in advance or more, so buying tickets to such events strikes me as a rather entrepreneurial activity. It is risk-taking: you cannot know whether you will enjoy the show or event and there are no reviews to read or critics to listen to. Yet if you decide that you cannot go to the event or change your mind, it is a good thing that there are proper secondary platforms developing to sell those tickets. These amendments would mean that people would think twice about that risk of buying tickets in the first place. They would be distortionary.
The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, mentioned botnets. I think they were also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, with whom I entirely agreed on his earlier amendment. I am afraid that I disagree with him now because surely there are very good pieces of software that can stop the purchasing where computers buy automatically. Those aggravating things where you have to fill in a distorted word to prove that you are human can stop the botnets.
The noble Baroness, Lady Heyhoe Flint, talked about her aggravation that somebody was paying £4,000 for a ticket to a cricket match. I am aggravated that that £4,000 is not going to the cricket club but rather to somebody else. If somebody is prepared to pay £4,000 for a ticket to a cricket match, why is the cricket club not charging that figure? That money would then go to the sport rather than to somebody else. Of course, the real problem is the ticket touts outside railway stations or on street corners who are selling outright fake tickets or perhaps their electronic equivalents. Selling electronic tickets or trading on the street without a licence is illegal; there is already legislation to deal with this problem. The secondary platforms are already ensuring that resold tickets are valid. They usually insist that the face value of the original ticket is stated during the transaction. The market is providing solutions. We do not need new legislation and new burdens. In any case, these amendments would hit the good guys instead of the bad guys.