Covid-19: Regional Theatres

Earl of Glasgow Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I hope that the noble Lord welcomes the new job support scheme and, importantly, its extension for self-employed people to the end of April. The uptake in the art sector of these schemes has been among the largest of any sector in the economy.

[The Earl of Glasgow (LD) [V]]

My Lords, those of us who are concerned about how badly Covid restrictions have affected British theatre are grateful to the Government for their recent generous contribution to helping it out. However, we are also concerned that too much of this money will be going to the big cities, such as London and Manchester, and that the provincial theatres, which are suffering at least as much, may be bypassed. These provincial theatres need to be maintained as venues for major touring companies as well as for their local theatre groups. It is worth reminding ourselves that these local theatre groups are the breeding ground for so many aspiring new actors and producers, which have helped to make British theatre the best in the world. The Minister has already half answered this question and has already assured us that she will concern herself very much with the provincial as well as with the major theatres.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble Earl for helping me to answer the question. He is quite right that there are two key criteria in the culture recovery fund: institutions of national importance, and making sure that we use that money to continue to help level up all our communities.

Theatre Tickets: London

Earl of Glasgow Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Earl of Glasgow]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to address the cost of theatre tickets in London and any effect this has on theatregoers.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, commercial theatres in London are responsible for setting their own ticketing price structures. Theatres supported by the Arts Council also operate independently of government and have autonomy in setting their prices. However, many theatres in London operate schemes to encourage more people to attend performances through free or discounted tickets and audience numbers have continued to grow.

[The Earl of Glasgow (LD)]

My Lords, as the Government are almost certainly aware, West End theatre is thriving at the moment. However, the price of a decent seat in the stalls, for example, has nearly doubled in the past three years. The Government may not be aware that the main beneficiaries of these higher prices are not so much the producers of the plays and musicals, but rather those who control access to theatres: the theatre owners, the ticket sellers and the discredited secondary ticket market. London theatres are already becoming too expensive for many regular theatregoers and I hope that the Government will take this issue very seriously. As we all know, one of the many reasons that people come to London is its theatres, but they are gradually becoming too expensive for anyone to be able to attend the major plays.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, the noble Earl has highlighted an issue at the very top of the range. Some of those ticket prices have gone up and I think the average top ticket now costs more than £100. However, there are many examples of theatres making a big effort to offer cheap prices. For example, the Donmar Warehouse offers free tickets to those aged under 25 each month via a ballot, while the Royal Court Theatre has discounted nights. There are many examples of where theatre seats can be obtained for much less than the top prices.

Breaching of Limits on Ticket Sales Regulations 2018

Earl of Glasgow Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, who has such a distinguished record in combating this terrible problem of ticket fraud and the exploitation of consumers. I also have one two questions for the Minister, which follow on from what the noble Lord has said.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, referred to the company viagogo. Has anything come of the warning by the Consumer Minister, Margot James, who advised anyone planning to buy tickets on resale websites, “Don’t choose Viagogo—they are the worst”? The Advertising Standards Authority has referred viagogo to National Trading Standards, citing a series of transgressions breaching the UK’s advertising code. Where has that inquiry got to and can the activities of viagogo in the United Kingdom be curbed, if not closed down altogether?

What steps have been taken to ensure that the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 provisions, which make it an offence to resell football tickets in Britain at more than list price, are being observed? What prosecutions have followed of people who have breached those provisions—not only viagogo but other companies using bots and touts in the way described by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan? Noble Lords with long memories will recall that that legislation was brought in not as a consumer protection measure but as a public safety and anti-hooliganism measure to solve the problem of fans of rival groups mixing together in a hostile manner in football grounds. One of the ways in which that could have been curbed was by ensuring that tickets were not being sold to anyone through undesirable sites such as viagogo and others.

Those are my only questions. I welcome the regulations and I hope they achieve the result the Minister has set out for them.

[The Earl of Glasgow (LD)]

My Lords, it is very important that the draft regulations laid before the House on 26 April should now be approved, and therefore I enthusiastically support this Motion. Bots in particular must be abolished. They were a method by which digital touts, which is what I call them, could acquire tickets for sporting and cultural events for the secondary ticketing market and resell them at greatly inflated prices. My concern, though, is that these unprincipled secondary market touts are clever and cunning. They will continue to find ways of trying to circumvent these regulations. It is therefore important that the National Trading Standards authority or another body like that is given more powers to monitor the regulations and, when necessary, prosecute offenders.

However, bots and the secondary ticketing market are not the only reasons why West End theatre prices for popular shows have risen so steeply over the past 10 years. Of the 40 or so main West End theatres, more than three-quarters of them are owned by just four companies. It is the theatres, not the producers of the shows, that fix the ticket prices, arrange special deals, determine the publicity and control the ticket agents, of which in each case they will be one themselves. It seems that this small number of theatre companies, acting as a sort of unofficial cartel, are in a position to dominate the London theatre market. Does the Minister agree that there should be an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority, or again some similar organisation, into this very unsatisfactory situation?

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I join those who have welcomed this statutory instrument. We could say that progress on the part of the Government has been somewhat slower than perhaps we would have wished, but nevertheless we are surely getting there. That is largely due to the fact that we are working in a cross-party way and in a spirit of collegiate support on the issues that are worrying us in this area.

In your Lordships’ House, this effort is led by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, who is in his place and has spoken out. However, it would be right at this point to recognise the work of the all-party group which he talked about, because it has indeed been good at keeping up pressure on the Government on this issue. We also miss, yet again, the spirit and enthusiasm of Baroness Heyhoe Flint, who sadly is no longer with us but who was definitely part of the team that includes on our side my noble friends Lady Hayter and Lord Collins, who have managed to keep this issue in front of your Lordships’ House and have got us to where we are today.

Having said that, others have mentioned the problem of resourcing the teams which will have to make sure that the new regulatory process works in practice, and that means trading standards in particular. It is not, as others have said, just a question of resources; it is also a question of matching the technical skills of those who are operating computers to try to cheat ordinary customers out of the ability to buy tickets as they would wish. I am sure that the Minister will have some words to say about that, but I would be grateful if he could make sure that we understand better how the resourcing element of this is going to be met.

Finally, we are still left with a couple of rough ends, and I do not think that we should consider this to be the end of the game. I have yet to have properly established what is a ticket; the legal definition still eludes those who have been working on this issue. It can either be a licence to attend a performance or it can be a piece of real property which, with justification, can be sold on to others. I think that it is a bit of both, and it would be helpful if we could make sure that we put into statute a proper definition of what a ticket is. Once we have that, the rest of the issues which are raised by this whole question of touting and how it operates will be erased.