Live Events Ticketing: Resale and Pricing Practices

Lord Moynihan Excerpts
Thursday 16th January 2025

(1 month, 1 week ago)

Lords Chamber
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Lord Moynihan Portrait Lord Moynihan (Con)
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My Lords, I warmly welcome today’s announcement and congratulate Chris Bryant on piloting the consultation legislation through Parliament. I declare an interest: I have worked passionately on this for 15 years with Sharon Hodgson, the excellent Labour MP, as co-chair of the APPG, and ending up as her frenemy on Times Radio couple of weeks ago— such is the way we work together. I totally share the commitment by the Government to better protect genuine fans through legislation, and I support them.

I have a few quick questions, but first I will say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that I do not believe that the Paris Olympics was a fair comparison. We did ban secondary ticket sales in the London Olympics 2012 and we managed through other measures to completely fill it. It was a phenomenal success, both at the Olympic and Paralympic Games, in demand for seats. It was done with very strict regulation—legal requirements—not to allow the secondary market, which was criminalised for the tickets.

The only seating that was a problem in Paris—and it was: I was there—was for the athletes. It is very difficult to determine how many seats should be left for athletes. They train, they go home, they do not necessarily decide whether they are going to be there, and that does lead to seats being left. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the secondary ticketing market.

I have three quick questions. Seeing how many excellent consultation exercises have landed in the long grass over the past 15 years—being hijacked, frankly, by modern-day ticket touts using bots, who have been very effective and put a lot of money behind their efforts—can the Minister promise primary legislation as soon as possible after this? I hope it will be in this Parliament, I hope it will be before I leave this House and I intend while I am here to work exceptionally hard to see that it is on the face of the legislation.

My number two question is: will attention be given to more details of the cap than have already been given today? Should it be face-value only? That, for example, is what the Principality Stadium does for Welsh rugby union matches. Or should it be a fee plus 10% to 13% for, say, administrative costs? That is the kind of range we should be consulting on. I would like to ask the Minister whether she agrees.

Finally, many modern-day ticket touts unfortunately move abroad—they are multi-billion pound organisations that are based overseas—and legislation has to be supranational in this context. We have to think about that very carefully in this consultation period.

Any crackdown on the black market has to be fully enforced. It is the terms and conditions that are abused time and again. That is illegal but, unlike in the current situation where prosecutions are few and far between, we cannot go through this consultation exercise without significantly reflecting on the fact that we have a prosecution service that can tackle this problem. We are talking about the future of true fans, many of whom travel the length and breadth of this country with their families, only to find that someone has swept the market with bots and printed forged tickets in order to satisfy the relationship with the secondary market, such as viagogo and Seatwave. They have to go home deeply unhappy, with little recourse in respect of their tickets, having travelled across the country to go to an event in their diary that was most important to them and their family.

This is the time for action, and I am delighted that the Government have come forward with measures along these lines.

Renewable Energy: Costs

Lord Moynihan Excerpts
Thursday 14th November 2024

(3 months, 1 week ago)

Lords Chamber
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Lord Moynihan Portrait Lord Moynihan (Con)
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My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of Acteon, which operates across global marine energy and offshore infrastructure services. Central to this debate is a clear understanding of the significant distinction between the availability of renewables and hydrocarbons. One leads to the generation of intermittent power; the other to much-needed baseload. While moving to an increasing share of renewables, we always require the availability of baseload.

I had the good fortune, as Energy Minister back in 1990, to introduce the first competitive framework for renewables: the non-fossil fuel obligation, which morphed into the contracts for difference that we have in place today. What it has not led to is a simple trade-off between gas-fired power generation and renewables. Even as we debate today, at this hour—not just last week—our grid status shows that 53% of our power generation is from gas, with wind at 18%. Nuclear at 13% is far too low; the late delivery of SMRs is due to their being stifled by bureaucracy. While gas plants account for about one-third of Britain’s power requirements and are destined to fall to an average of 5% in about 10 years, we still have to retain the capacity of these gas-fired plants as a strategic reserve for windless days like today.

It is worth pointing out that we will not achieve that switch without substantial investment and private sector creativity. The recent NESO report, referred to by my noble friend Lord Frost, finds that the shift to renewables necessary for the Government to reach their flagship manifesto pledge of a clean power system in 2030 will require annual investment of more than £40 billion, with nearly 2,700 miles of offshore electric cables and 620 miles of new onshore cabling.

The alternative to this scenario necessitates storage solutions, and while I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that storage technology is improving, there is a long road to travel to reach scalability and affordability. The capex has to be found by the Government if they want to keep the promise made by the Secretary of State Ed Miliband that household bills will fall. Given this reality, it would be irresponsible to turn our back on maximising domestic gas production in the UKCS. A stable fiscal regime for gas production is essential in a highly competitive global market for investment dollars. Norway has a consistent 78% tax rate. If the Government are to follow the Norwegian model, which they began to do in the Budget, the next steps must include further investment allowances. Without them, we face—as we do today—a premature wind-up of the UKCS, leaving gas stranded and substituted not by renewables but by expensive, more polluting, imported LNG, which makes neither economic nor environmental sense.

Renewable energy sources come with massive upfront capital investments which cannot be excluded in any cost comparison. Maintenance, decommissioning, grid costs and life-cycle replacement need to be costed. It is true that the marginal cost of producing electricity from wind or solar, once the facilities are operational, is extraordinarily low. In summary, we have to create a resilient, sustainable energy system which has to underpin energy security. The key, as ever, will lie in the strategic investments we make today, in both technology and infrastructure, and in private sector investment to ensure that we are not merely reacting to market forces but proactively shaping the energy landscape for generations to come. This, I would argue, is a future well worth striving for, and I wish the Government well.