Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Baroness Crawley and Lord Moynihan

Report stage
Wednesday 13th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, as the third of the consumer protection enforcement team mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Stevenson, I have added my name to Amendments 109 and 115.

Amendment 109 concerns the issue of fake reviews; this has already been well set out by the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. It is worth looking again at Hansard and the example from the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, of the live evidence we have received from the National Trading Standards eCrime Team as to the sites where people are handing over their money as we speak, thinking they have read a legitimate review and bought an amazing product, but the product does not exist.

I recognise the move that the Government have made in adding fake reviews to the list of 31 commercial practices that are, in all circumstances, considered unfair and banned practices. However, trading standards sees the practice of giving fake reviews as clearly fraudulent in nature, and therefore it should be a criminal as well as a civil offence, if the circumstances are correct for that judgment to be made. At the moment, we are confined to looking at fake reviews as a civil offence.

Fake reviews are also a growing distortion of the online marketplace. They are unfair to legitimate businesses and completely deceptive of consumers. This amendment is important in making fake reviews a criminal as well as a civil offence. I hope that the Minister understands the seriousness of this—I am sure he does—and will think again about his stance on this amendment.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 150, which builds on the work undertaken in this House at the time of the Consumer Rights Act 2015. I am fully supported by the indefatigable Sharon Hodgson, the MP for Washington and Sunderland West in another place, who is the co-chair of the APPG on Ticket Abuse; I am the other co-chair. Many leading musicians, sportsmen and sportswomen also support further action, as does FanFair Alliance.

Amendment 156 seeks to protect the many people who buy tickets for popular sport and arts events from the fraudulent abuse provided by a poorly regulated secondary market, a term coined by touts in 2008 to provide their activities with a veneer of respectability. What we are dealing with is a black market that profits from ticket obtained in bulk, illegally. Promoters whose terms and conditions are ignored have, in effect, lost the ability to sell tickets to the public at face value. To see hundreds of thousands of attempts by bots to harvest tickets in bulk for a single event is not uncommon. These amendments simply seek to implement recommendations made by the Competition and Markets Authority and to provide important safeguards for consumers. As evidenced by the security team at the O2, there are daily stories of families travelling to London to go to sold-out events finding on arrival that the tickets they had bought in good faith were fraudulently sold and unsuitable for admission. They have no recourse available to them at the time of the event. They have lost all the costs they incurred for travel and a hotel, to which must be added the bitter disappointment of missing what might be the event of a lifetime for them and their children, and all the incidental costs of the process.

In 2007, when I joined the campaign against modern-day ticket touts, there were approximately 120 full-time ticket touts in the United Kingdom. By 2015, the number had risen to 400, who regularly attacked primary ticketing systems using aggressive software to harvest tickets in bulk—400 too many when we were working on the Bill which resulted in the Government accepting many of our amendments. Today, there are not 400, there are between 3,000 and 4,000 touts, not based only in the UK but attacking ticket systems for UK events. This explosion has been brought about by the advent of mobile and digital ticketing. Whereas touts previously had to wait for paper tickets to arrive by post, they can now harvest tickets and send them out in an instant from mobile devices and apps.

Put simply, this aggressive software takes the form of scalper bots, computer programs which can store the details of hundreds of credit cards, which, at the press of a button, sweep the market for tickets for popular events while the likes of us and, more importantly, many families across the country are filling in all their details online, often waiting a long time for their applications to be processed, only to find that all the tickets have been sold. Within minutes after filling in the forms, the tickets they were seeking appear on secondary ticketing sites, at vastly inflated prices, benefiting only the touts and the secondary platforms. Most ordinary fans do not stand a chance against this. This is particularly true, sadly, at the Royal Albert Hall, where the market provides evidence that board members and trustees can benefit from the corrosive practices of the secondary market, which I address in Amendment 151.

The truth is that tickets are being harvested by today’s ticket touts in bulk. To do so, they have perfected their trade to the point that they have become “trusted suppliers” for the likes of viagogo and StubHub and guarantee the delivery of a large number of tickets before they have gone on sale to the public. If, for whatever reason, they fail to deliver their tickets, many resort to printing fraudulent tickets and delivering them to the secondary market to retain their trusted supplier status in the future, to the detriment of consumers who turn up to the concert or sport event to find that they are turned away.

My noble friend the Minister kindly wrote to Members of the Committee and was correct when he said that ticketing is more secure. However, the same technology also enables touts to carry out larger attacks on ticketing systems than ever before due to the increased portability of digital tickets. Frankly, the ticketing industry is on the cusp of losing the ability to sell tickets to genuine fans at an affordable price, thus depriving the lowest-paid, hardest-working fans of the ability to see their favourite artist or sports team.

In writing to the Members of the Committee, my noble friend the Minister mentioned the trial resulting in the conviction of two touts and the subsequent £6 million forfeiture order. They used dishonest and fraudulent tactics which would have been found out far sooner if the amendments before the House this evening were on the statute book. National Trading Standards, whose budget has been frozen for many years, has stated that it simply does not have the budget to pursue any more cases of this kind. The number of touts now attacking ticketing systems makes it an impossible task for law enforcement to prosecute some, let alone all, of them to the point where it would disrupt their activities and protect consumers.

Recently, viagogo has taken to concealing the face value of tickets behind an icon. This is a loophole in consumer protection that needs to be closed. Consumers should be able to see clearly the original price of the ticket they are about to purchase, as well as the ticket tout’s details, in order to check that the business they are buying from even exists. That would have helped both the cases that are currently under consideration by the courts.