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Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Consideration of Lords message

Secondary ticketing facilities

Mrs Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West, Labour)

I am thrilled to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), who has done so much work on this matter in the past few years, especially since she took on the brief. She made an excellent speech.

Here we are again. I see that we have been joined by the hon. Member for Shipley (Sir Philip Davies), who back in 2011 did the terrible thing—he might not think it was, but I do—of talking out my private Member’s Bill, the Sale of Tickets (Sporting and Cultural Events) Bill. If it had been passed, we would not be here today, because we would have already fixed this broken market well over a decade ago. I welcome him to his place—I know he likes to keep an eye on his handiwork.

Angus Brendan MacNeil
It is a great shame that the hon. Lady was not listened to 13 years ago, but I have a feeling that, unfortunately, after the Euros, with a political microscope on this issue, we will be back here an awful lot sooner than we think.

Mrs Hodgson
Sadly, if amendment 104B is not accepted today, that might be the case.

I welcome the opportunity to speak in today’s debate, as short as it might be. I am sure that the Minister is aware that I am here in my capacity as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse, which has done some great work in this area. I support the Opposition’s manuscript amendment, and therefore support the revised Lords amendment 104B as it relates to the secondary ticketing market. As others have done, I thank the excellent Lord Moynihan for his continued efforts as co-chair of the all-party group to regulate black market resale sites such as Viagogo. He is right to do so, and I commend his tenacity and brilliant work over many years. I fully supported the original amendment 104, but I warmly welcome the difficult decision to reintroduce the amendment with some notable changes.

The Government’s reason for rejecting the original amendment was:

“Because protections for consumers in relation to secondary ticketing are adequately provided for under existing legislation.”

However, despite uncontrolled touting taking place on an industrial scale, with tickets resold through sites such as Viagogo, there has not been a single prosecution under the Breaching of Limits on Ticket Sales Regulations 2018, no convictions for using bots under the Digital Economy Act 2017, and only two major tout prosecutions, with six individual convictions, since 2017. I can hardly see how the Government can describe current legislation as adequate.

Angus Brendan MacNeil
The hon. Lady mentioned Lord Moynihan. For context, it should be remembered that he was a sports Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Government. If a Thatcher Minister is anti-market—the charge made from the Conservative Benches against anyone who supports his amendment—either the world has gone topsy-turvy or the Tory party has gone so far to the right it has lost itself.

Mrs Hodgson
The hon. Gentleman makes exactly the correct point. Lord Moynihan was a highly respected Minister, and he is hardly a lefty—or whatever it is that people call people like me.

15:45:00

While I welcome the Government’s somewhat muted attempts to enforce existing law with their amendments in lieu, fans are crying out for more concrete action. Common-sense amendment 104B seems timely, with the so-called “ticket queen” just last week sentenced to four years behind bars, but again, with just two cases prosecuted over six years and only six convictions and zero budget for more, this latest prosecution is not a success of the current regulations, but a damning indictment of their inadequacy.

Viagogo claims that “bad actors” such as the ticket queen

“go against all we stand for”.

Yet while British music lovers were conned and defrauded by these crooks—they are crooks, because they are now in jail—Viagogo and other secondary websites are likely to have made millions of pounds in service fees from their transactions, perhaps as much as £4 million by my calculations. And that is for only one group of touts who were permitted to list tens of thousands of tickets, no questions asked.

I fear that this dirty money is now being used to fuel a huge lobbying and public relations campaign that, I have to say, appears to have worked on some Government Ministers and some advisers. When they champion Viagogo’s rip-off business model at the Dispatch Box, they are regurgitating at length its bogus evidence and unsubstantiated claims about the impacts of our current pro-consumer legislation, which, as I have already said, is just not adequate. From the few convicted touts alone, the secondary ticketing market is receiving potentially tens of millions of pounds in—it has to be said—the proceeds of crime. Viagogo’s boss, who has no-showed multiple times at parliamentary inquiries, declined to answer whether Viagogo may have benefited, inadvertently or not, from the proceeds of those crimes, when asked in an interview recently by Rob Davies of The Guardian.

Had amendment 104, with its five uncontroversial measures, been in place at the time, it is unlikely that these crimes would have been committed in the first place. Three things would have occurred. First, the touts would have been allowed to re-sell only the same number of tickets they could buy in the primary market. Secondly, the secondary platform operators, Viagogo and Ticketmaster, would have needed to check the receipts of those tickets. Thirdly, ticket buyers would have been provided with far clearer information about who they were buying from, and would have likely reconsidered.

This past weekend, I was also made aware, again from the article in The Guardian by Rob Davies, which my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South also referred to, that Viagogo was listing 100 seats at Wembley for England’s 7 June friendly against Iceland. I remind the House that the resale of football tickets without permission from clubs or football governing bodies has been illegal in England and Wales since 1994. Viagogo has been asked how many football tickets it has sold over the years—not just recently, through what it called human error—how much it has made from such sales and whether it would donate that income to grassroots football charities. Its answer? Silence. The Government must be under no illusions: this is a thriving online black market that is scamming hard-working families. With the cost of living crisis ongoing, it is heartbreaking to see live events added to the pile of small luxuries being taken away by parasitic touts and Government inaction.

In a few weeks’ time, fans will be gathering for Taylor Swift’s first UK performance. I do not know whether any colleagues are going to see Taylor Swift, but the first concert is on 7 June in Edinburgh. I have already heard of single seats, with average to poor views, going on sale for up to £600 on secondary websites—many times their face value—and seats next to each other for upwards of £1,000 each.

While this will be an amazing night for many—I am sure that the Minister and his family will enjoy it—as will all the nights that follow, I have heard from industry specialists that they expect dozens of fans at each gig, perhaps more, to be heartbroken when they are turned away with invalid tickets bought from sites such as Viagogo. Many venues have now had to set up special services to deal with these victims of fake or invalid tickets bought online, because they know that it is going to happen. Lots of fans will already have shelled out hundreds of pounds for travel and accommodation, and some may not even receive a refund for their ticket, despite Viagogo’s so-called guarantee. This was the focus of the “Watchdog” section of the BBC’s “The One Show” recently, which I shared with the Minister just last week—I hope he had time to watch it. It is still not too late to fix this broken market, and I implore the Government to support the revised Lords amendment 104B. The Minister could change his mind when he gets to his feet.

In addition, despite the overwhelming evidence and the already damning findings of the excellent independent review produced by Professor Michael Waterson in 2016 following the enactment of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, Lords amendment 104B endorses yet another review of the secondary ticketing market, which the Government have previously called for, while maintaining some of the problems that Lords amendment 104 would have fixed.

Angus Brendan MacNeil
The hon. Lady has touched on the industrial scale of this practice, and we have heard about touts outside venues. Families may be thinking of buying tickets, and committing themselves to travelling and spending money on hotels, and that is what is wrong. If that happens again, the Government should face those families and explain why it has happened.

Mrs Hodgson
That is a very good point. As much as none of us wants to see any unhappy, devastated fans at any of these venues, we will probably have to face those images, in the emails from those fans, on our television screens and maybe on the front pages of newspapers. We have to be prepared for that, and I am sure that the Minister would be sad to see it.

If the Government are truly committed to another review, I know that Lord Moynihan—as we have heard, a highly respected Conservative Lord and a former Minister—has already been recommended to them as a possible chair. [Interruption.] I hope that the hon. Member for Shipley is agreeing with me. I hope he agrees that that would be a very fair and pragmatic selection. It is one that I would wholeheartedly support.

I will conclude. On two occasions the Lords, having listened to evidence and the stated views of the CMA, have voted through these amendments, but Ministers seem hellbent on ignoring the views of the other place. The Lords have sent a clear message to the Government, asking them to look at the facts and think again. I ask the Minister once again: will he finally side with fans, artists and athletes, support Lords amendment 104B today, and not let this be another opportunity wasted by the Conservative Government? As I said in our last debate on this matter, they should either start putting fans first, or move aside so that we can.

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