Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 30th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I agree that some of the examples are shocking. The key question is what measures we will put in place to address them. Ireland, for example, completely banned secondary sales, yet the prices seen on the internet are equivalent to what the hon. Lady describes, so there is no perfect solution that has already been tried. However, we are very happy to look at the evidence, look at what might be done, and do something that is effective, rather than crowd-pleasing. That is what we are committed to doing.

The reality is that some organisers are simply much more successful than others at preventing large-scale unauthorised resales. The ticket market is clearly evolving rapidly. Our review will therefore consider evidence from businesses and platforms operating in ticketing and resale markets, as well as venues, artists, enforcers and consumers. The Government intend the review to take place over nine months, after which we will consider any appropriate further action. [Hon. Members: “You won’t be there.”] Members who are commenting from a sedentary position should beware of overconfidence.

I very much hope that hon. Members will support the Government’s position today. I especially hope that Members in both Houses will note our movement in two important areas: the Secretary of State’s approval of CMA guidance for the new digital markets regime, and secondary ticketing. These changes are considered and balanced, and I urge Members in the other place to consider their position on the other amendments that our motions today seek to reject. Throughout the Bill’s passage, the Government have listened carefully to the arguments presented, and in response, we have made a series of significant changes where we recognise that improvements could be made. It is important that we now reach full consensus on the Bill’s final form, so that it reaches the statute book without further delay.

[Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

First, I pay tribute to my much-loved neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), who led for Labour during the last round of proceedings on the Bill, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra), who led for us when the Bill was introduced.

Might I say a few words about the Minister? I do love the Minister. Members sitting on the Government Back Benches will not have been able to see the little wry smile playing on his face as he made his speech. Unfortunately, Hansard is not able to record that element of the way he presented his case. I will let the House into a secret: there are two versions of the Minister, or rather the Member. There is the Back-Bench Member, who I passionately agree with on nearly everything, and then there is the Government Minister, who has the Back-Bench Member sitting inside him somewhere, but has managed to lose him while taking on corporate and shared responsibility on the Government Front Benches. I bet that if he were in the Parliament that follows the next general election, and we debated these matters all over again, he would be articulating what I am about to say almost word for word, but today, he has articulated the Government position.

[Sir John Whittingdale]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Of course I will, to the right hon. Gentleman—another gentleman for whom I have a great deal of respect, and with whom I occasionally disagree.

[Sir John Whittingdale]

I just wonder whether the transformation that the hon. Gentleman describes, which occurs when somebody moves from the Back Benches to the Front Bench, applies equally to the Opposition and the Government.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

The right hon. Gentleman knows more about bobbing between the Back Benches and the Front Bench than most Members of Parliament in history, I think. It is obviously a problem; I do believe in shared responsibility of Government—we want Governments to act as a single body, and not irresponsibly—so I understand, but none the less, it is perfectly appropriate to tease the Minister when he has such a wry smile on his lips.

This Bill is a classic instance of how the Tory chaos of the past few years has been bad for Britain. It is long overdue, as the Minister said: it started in the Commons more than a year ago, on 25 April 2023, and it is so delayed that the carry-over motion had to be carried over. I cannot remember that happening for many years, but the Government had to do it last week. The Bill used to strike the right balance between the needs of different parts of the market, but the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) was absolutely right to say that many stakeholders are certainly not happy with where the Government have landed. Intense lobbying of Downing Street from some parts of the market has led to the Government tabling amendments that would fatally undermine the Bill’s purpose and make it impossible for the CMA to do the job that we want it to do, namely, ensure fair competition in digital markets in the interests of consumers, investors and wider society.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

How would a tribunal consider the appropriateness of a CMA intervention without considering the detail and merit of it?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

The point is that either the change is necessary because a new and different measure is being adopted by the Government, in which case it is a lower threshold and therefore inappropriate, or the change makes no difference whatsoever, in which case it is unnecessary. The normal standards for deciding whether an amendment is appropriate would lead us to ask, “Is it necessary, or does it provide a good remedy?” I do not think that either is the case, which is why Labour does not support the Government’s wording.

The second set of amendments, Lords amendments 12 and 13, deal with countervailing benefits. Just to prove that Labour Members speaking from the Dispatch Box are very consistent with one another, my next sentence was effectively said by my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd in a previous debate: the countervailing benefits exemption allows the Competition and Markets Authority to close an investigation of a breach of a conduct requirement if a firm can demonstrate that its anti-competitive conduct produces benefits that outweigh the harm and are therefore indispensable. On Report in the Commons, the Government significantly reduced the threshold for that exemption, removing the word “indispensable” and merely requiring that

“those benefits could not be realised without the conduct”.

It sounds the same, but it is different—subtly but importantly different. The Lords amendments would remove that paragraph and alter the next line so that it reads

“the conduct is indispensable and proportionate to the realisation of those benefits”.

I will make two points in this area. First, as I think everybody accepts, the “indispensable” standard is a well-understood concept in UK competition law: it is used in the Competition Act 1998, which I do not believe to be as outmoded as some Members have suggested. Secondly, the courts would interpret Parliament’s deliberate move away from an existing, well-understood standard as intending to create a new, lower threshold, which again will inevitably allow the big tech firms greater scope to launch complex legal challenges.

If the Government really do not see any distinction between the two thresholds, the most obvious compromise would be to reinstate the word “indispensable” alongside the Bill’s new wording and to clarify, today at the Dispatch Box and in the Bill’s explanatory notes, that the “indispensable” standard and the new form of words inserted by the Government have an identical meaning. Otherwise, there is a risk that the courts will seek to explore further whether Parliament has deliberately created a new threshold and standard.

I simply say to the Minister that I remember, when he was on the Back Benches and we had lengthy discussions about the powers of Companies House, that he was very keen on making sure that Companies House had the powers it needed to do proper investigations. He regularly made the point that lots of people have very deep legal pockets, and that does not necessarily mean that the consumer always wins out. I would argue that it is the same in this case.

Lords amendments 26 to 28 to clause 89 and Lords amendments 31 and 32 to clause 103 relate to appeals. The Bill originally had judicial review as the appeal standard for all CMA decisions under part 1, but in the Commons the Government moved to merits appeals for penalty decisions. I accept that this is only about penalty decisions, but I none the less believe that it is dangerous because, while the new regime is intended to be collaborative, it is ultimately the threat of fines that will incentivise big tech firms to comply with the CMA’s decisions. If there is no prospect of a fine, whether large or small, those large tech firms may well decide to be less collaborative.

There is the even greater danger that merits appeals on penalty decisions bleed back across the Bill into regulatory decisions, giving big tech firms greater scope to frustrate and challenge the CMA’s decisions. While it is correct that the courts are generally able to distinguish between judicial review and merits elements of appeals—that point has been made in previous debates by the former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright)—it does not eliminate the concern about the two bleeding into each other, especially if the two streams take place together in the same case. If the Government are unable to reinstate judicial review appeals across part 1, as we would prefer, a clarificatory amendment should be inserted in the Bill to provide certainty that appeals on penalties cannot impact on other regulatory decisions to eliminate scope for speculative challenges.

It is worth bearing in mind that the chief executive of the CMA has made it clear that the authority wants the judicial review standard to apply. She welcomed effective judicial scrutiny of its decisions, but said:

“We think that the JR standard achieves that.”

She went on to say that her experience of merits appeals was that they result in

“very protracted litigation”,

making it

“a lot harder to reach constructive, collaborative outcomes”,

because

“all eyes are on that litigation process.”––[Official Report, Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Public Bill Committee, 13 June 2023; c. 7, 8, Q4.]

Let me come on to the matter of ticket touting, and Lords amendment 104. I start by thanking Lord Moynihan—a Conservative peer, of course—for tabling this amendment and for his significant work across many years. When I have not agreed with every sentence from my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) on this subject, I have sometimes felt the scratches on my back from her very elegant fingernails, but she has also done enormous work, and I think she is much to be praised for it. There are many others in the House of whom that is true as well, including all those sitting next to her on the back row, who I am sure will catch your eye later, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I start from a very simple principle: the value of a ticket—whether for the rugby, the football or a gig at the O2—is created by the artists, the promoters and, above all, the fans. Yes, the secondary ticketing market can help all three, because sometimes people buy more tickets than they need or are unable to attend for whatever reason, but the abuse of the secondary market can lead to artists, promoters and fans all losing out, and abuse is rife.

I will take an example of a case that has already been through the courts. It is that of Lynda Chenery, Mark Woods, Maria Chenery-Woods and Paul Douglas, who bought and resold concert tickets worth £6.5 million. They bought them on primary sites, including Ticketmaster, before reselling them on secondary ticketing platforms, such as Viagogo, at inflated prices. They used endless tricks, including sending customers ripped envelopes to imply that the tickets had been lost in transit or using fraud juice, which involved the use of Tipp-Ex correcting fluid or more sophisticated digital methods, to amend tickets. They held their customers in open derision. Having scammed one person into paying £535 for a ticket for the Harry Potter west end show, they referred to him in an email as “another idiot”. These people are despicable parasites preying on fans, and we need to go far further to address this issue.

This practice prices many fans out of the market and adds no value whatsoever to the creative process, at a time when creators are in desperate need of making a living out of their craft. In 2016, one ticket for Adele at the O2 arena in London was listed on GetMeIn for £24,840, which is 290 times the face value of the ticket. Nobody in the Rhondda would be to afford such a ticket. Incidentally, Wimbledon faces exactly the same set of problems.

Viagogo is today selling two tickets for Pink at the Millennium stadium in Cardiff on 11 June for £498 each. I think the fans could perfectly legitimately start shouting:

“What about us?

What about all the plans that ended in disaster?”

It is not obvious what the original price was for those tickets. On Viagogo, people can get one ticket for Peter Kay at the O2 on 4 May for £302, or tickets for “The Book of Mormon”—it has been in the theatre for several years, and is a wonderful, hilarious show—on 4 May at £420 each. In a way, the one that upsets me the most is that tickets for the ballet “The Winter’s Tale” at the Royal Opera House on 3 May—a Friday night—are £1,006 each, but people can buy those tickets from the Royal Opera House for £140, because there is taxpayer involvement in supporting the Royal Opera House.

We could say the same of StubHub, on which two standing tickets for Doja Cat in Glasgow on 11 June with a face value of £162 are selling at £1,002. This is a pernicious industry. It is parasitical, it does nothing for the creative industries in this country and we must tackle it.

[Mrs Hodgson]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I feel the fingernails.

[Mrs Hodgson]

I waited until my hon. Friend got to the end of all those disgraceful, abhorrent examples. Will he clarify for me a fallacy that the touts often put around about me and my hon. Friends—they will say the same about him? They say that we want to stop people being able to resell their tickets when they cannot go—they have bought them in good faith and genuinely cannot go. Will he clarify that that is not what any of us seeks to do? I of course want people to be able to resell their tickets, but at face value. Does he agree?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I completely agree, and that is Labour party policy. I am used to fallacies being written about me, and I have seen many written about my hon. Friend as well. I am sure we will all get over it. Incidentally, that is why, as I shall come on to say later, it is very important that we have a free press that is able to say what it wants, free from the intervention of state owners from other countries.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, it is perfectly legitimate for somebody who has bought a couple of tickets for Saturday night and who suddenly finds that they are ill, that they have to go to a family engagement or that they have bought tickets for the wrong night to be able to sell them on at face value, or perhaps for a little bit more simply to cover the cost of administration and things like that. However, this is a market that is not working. It is an example of market failure, not an example of market success.

[Barbara Keeley]

rose—

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I feel more fingernails.

[Barbara Keeley]

My fingernails are nothing like as bad. Does my hon. Friend agree that the problem is actually worse than just the prices he quoted, of which he gave some really good and powerful examples, because of the selling of tickets that do not actually exist—fraudulent tickets? I have heard from a number of venues about the selling of tickets that should go to carers or young people. People are turning up at events such as those at the O2 and other venues with these tickets and being turned away, often when they have travelled to London and paid for hotels. So there is all the disappointment and the financial loss of that on top of the ticket prices.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I completely agree, and my hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are terrible instances of all sorts of different scams, and—this is the honest truth—remarkably few prosecutions. Whether the number is two, four or five, it should be in the hundreds. [Interruption.] Six—half a dozen—great!

The truth is that we all know instances from our constituencies of people who have faced precisely these problems. I have had constituents say to me, “I feel too embarrassed to own up to having bought these tickets.” I remember going past the Millennium stadium in Cardiff, or Arms Park in the old days, and we all despised the ticket touts, just as we did outside a Kate Bush concert or whatever. Sometimes, however, we were just so desperate that we bought the tickets, and they of course turned out to be fraudulent or non-existent, or they were allocated to specific kinds of people that did not include us. All those points are worth making, and I would add this one: all local authorities have trading standards offices but many are now so depleted because of the state of local government finances that it is very difficult for anybody to get proper recompense and a deal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

It was your idea.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Well, we have moved on and it is about time the Government moved on—in fact I look forward to the day when the Minister moves on from Government Benches to here on the Opposition Benches. The idea of a review at the dog end of a Parliament and at the end of the regime is absolutely pathetic, and I am glad the Minister is laughing at himself for even presenting the suggestion today.

Let me end with an area of agreement. We were glad that the Government, under pressure, tabled Lords amendment 117 on mergers involving newspaper enterprises and foreign powers along the lines of measures that we and others, including a large number of Conservative MPs and peers, had called for. Of course the UK must remain an open economy; we welcome foreign investment in many sectors in the UK. But we agree that in this limited area, the state ownership of UK newspaper and media companies must be a matter for concern, which is why we support the Lords amendment. We will need to make sure in future years that it is adequate to the situation we find, not least bearing in mind many of the comments made earlier by Members on both sides of the House regarding the rather fluid world we are moving into, where newspapers are a rather outdated concept and social media and other forms of online media are far more significant. We will keep that under review, therefore, but we welcome the amendment the Government have tabled.

This long-delayed Bill could go forward with strong, unanimous support if the Government abandoned their tilt towards the few potentially monopolistic companies and set aside their objections to the Lords amendments. Those objections are either completely otiose or they are dangerous. The Minister says they make no difference, I say they do, but on either grounds they should go, so we support their lordships in their amendments.

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

May I start by saying that this was and still is a good Bill? It does an enormous number of very important things and I am glad to see that it has broad acceptance and agreement on both sides of the House, although with some minor points of disagreement. It contains many of the measures that I personally called for in my Government-commissioned review of competition policy called “Power to the people” a little while ago, and it definitely updates and makes some much-needed changes to our competition and consumer laws. However, I share some of the concerns raised today about the Government’s opposition to four of the amendments that have come back from the Lords.

I do not have worries about the Lords amendments themselves because, as we have just heard from the Opposition Front-Bench spokesperson the hon. Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant), they mainly seek to restore the effect of clauses that were in the Bill when it originally came to this House. What worries me is that the wrong people are clapping. The changes that the Government have made, in many cases by seeking to resist Lords amendments, seem to many people to be on the side of the big tech firms rather than on the side of consumers, of sharper competition, of more consumer choice and of standing up for the man and woman in the street. I therefore earnestly hope that the Minister will be able to channel his historical zeal for these things in his closing remarks and reassure me, and I am sure others as well, that that is not the Government’s intention and that they remain committed to those things—that the fire still burns brightly in his eyes to make them happen.

I start by saying that the Government have already done some of that work with amendment (a) in lieu of Lords amendment 38—they have replaced the Lansley amendment with a version of their own—dealing with the amount of time that the Secretary of State can take in dealing with guidance put forward by the CMA to make sure it is not unduly delayed. That is extremely welcome and a very good measure, and I enthusiastically support it. However, we have already heard about two other things in particular. One is the role of judicial review in dealing with penalties. I share the concern that in moving away from a judicial review standard for penalties to a full merits review we may get bleed-across—that clever lawyers working for big tech firms may effectively be able to broaden the scope through clever use of legal techniques to prolong their attempts to walk backwards slowly and prevent justice from being done. I therefore devoutly hope that my good friend the Minister will be able to clarify that he expects to be able to show to us—either from the Dispatch Box now, or in guidance or another kind of clarification in due course—that it will not be possible for bleed-across to happen and he will be able to take any steps that may be needed.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Penrose]

We are making marvellous progress and ending up with changes being confirmed on the Floor of the House in a way I do not think I have seen before, so let us keep going.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

rose—

[John Penrose]

I am sure this will be an equally constructive intervention, of course.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Would it not be even more helpful if the Minister were to say he would change the explanatory memorandums as well?

[John Penrose]

I am sure the Minister will grab that opportunity in his closing remarks, if he so wishes. At least he has taken the opportunity to stand up and give us public reassurances on the record about the standard that is intended. It is clear that it is no lower than it originally was, which is an important change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Hodgson]

It absolutely is. It is not a level playing field at all. I was going to come to the bots, and the fact that nobody has yet been put behind bars for having used bots, even though they are illegal, and are the tool that touts use to harvest tickets, so that they can scam the rest of the population and all our constituents. I am happy to stand here and crowd-please—I will do it until my dying breath—because that is what we are here to do. We should do the right thing for the public, and they are calling for us to regulate this market.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I do not want my hon. Friend’s dying breath. Did she notice that the lovely Minister did not even present a single argument against any of the elements in the Lords amendment? He did not make the argument on why the Government do not support it, even though it is a patently obvious and sensible measure.

[Mrs Hodgson]

That is a good observation. To hazard a guess, the Minister probably agrees with the Lords amendment. He is a decent chap, and I think he sees the right in it, but he is sitting on the Government Benches. He is always welcome to come and join us on these Benches—it is quite a popular thing to do lately. If he wants to come over here, we will sort this out. It would be great if he was part of that, which is probably deep down what he would like to do.

All the websites that we are talking about are based outside the UK. They employ, essentially, no British staff—maybe a handful at most, but it is hard to check. They all masquerade as marketplaces where fans can buy and resell with other fans, but we know that is not true. All are dominated by large-scale online touts committing criminal offences to harvest tickets in bulk, as my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) said in his excellent intervention. That has led to a highly lucrative resale market worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

This is not small fry anymore. Face-value tickets are syphoned away from genuine fans and sold back to them at highly inflated prices. My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) said in her excellent speech that the number of touts has gone from hundreds to many, many thousands. It is getting out of proportion. This is best summed up by Chris Allison, the former deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police. Following a four-year investigation of touts post the Olympics—those tickets were protected in law, as I mentioned earlier—he stated:

“Touts are part of organised criminal networks often involved in other crimes”.

In recent years, enforcement bodies such as the CMA, National Trading Standards and the Advertising Standards Authority have tried, with varying degrees of success, to intervene in this broken market, either to prosecute the touts who are unlawfully defrauding music and sports lovers, or to force the ticket resale websites to comply with consumer protection legislation. And, oh my, the CMA has tried so hard to force those websites to comply, using the measures that it has to hand, which are not enough. It has even asked for further measures; as we heard in the last debate on this subject, the Government rejected that.

This has become an increasingly complex situation to sort out. That is why the Labour party is seeking to follow the examples of countries such as Ireland, France and Australia by capping the price at which tickets can be resold. Let me draw the House’s attention to my private Member’s Bill in 2011, which sought to do just that: cap resale at face value plus 10%, as the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant), said. That would allow someone reselling tickets to reclaim extra costs, such as booking fees.

Contrary to what has been written about me over many years, I do not want to stop any fans from reselling their tickets if they can no longer go to the event. I just want the industrial-scale, parasitic scalping to stop. However, until we get to that point—and while the Conservatives are still in government—it is important that current legislation is made as effective as possible. They could ensure that now. The small measures that we are talking about do not go as far as we plan to go, but they would be a start in preventing consumer harm and making it harder for bad actors to thrive.

I support Lords amendment 104, introduced by my friend and co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse Lord Moynihan, with the assistance of Lord Clement-Jones, Baroness Jones and others. We have Lord Moynihan to thank for the amendments to the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that got through small measures that we hoped would be the panacea for all the problems in the secondary market, but nine years later, that Act has not fixed this broken market. That is why we need this amendment.

In the amendment, proposed new section 92A(1) of the 2015 Act would compel touts to provide proof of purchase to the ticketing facility, or evidence of title to the tickets offered for resale. That is common sense, pragmatic and cost-free. The provision would target traders and businesses only, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South said, would eliminate the speculative selling that is endemic on platforms such as Viagogo, and the emotional devastation and physical risk that comes with it. I have seen numerous cases of what she spoke about: people being turned away, after having travelled from one end of the country to the other at great expense, and having booked overnight accommodation. They find that they cannot get into the theatre, the O2, the concert or whatever it may be, because they have invalid tickets.

Someone wrote to me recently who got in touch with Viagogo before the event because they feared that they had an invalid ticket. They were told to try their luck on the door, regardless of the fact that it was an invalid ticket. They knew that they would be turned away at the door with this Taylor Swift ticket, but were told, “Just try your luck. If you can’t get in, we’ll give you a refund.” They would have to fight for it first, and it would take six months if they were lucky. This person was also told, “Why not sell it on? List it again, and we won’t charge you a fee.” It is outrageous that she was supposed to pass it on. I have emails between her and Viagogo to back this up. She was being encouraged to sell on a ticket that she knew was invalid, causing more victims. Those are the sorts of practices that these websites use.

In August 2022, an ITV investigation based on data from FanFair Alliance found that two thirds of festival tickets on Viagogo were fraudulently listed by just three individuals. These resellers are relatively few in number but account for 90% to 95% of the tickets sold on platforms such as Viagogo. Let us think about that: just three major touts were selling 90% to 95% of festival tickets. Other platforms, such as Gigsberg, are 100% reliant on businesses and traders, many of whom my APPG and the CMA believe are acting illegally.

Subsection (2) of proposed new section 92A would crack down on the industrial harvesting of tickets by preventing resellers from selling more tickets to an event than they can legally purchase from the primary market. That is just common sense, surely. This was first recommended by the CMA in August 2021, almost three years ago. It made the proposal after a six-year enforcement investigation that concluded, as I said, that the CMA needed “stronger laws” to tackle illegal ticket resale. This change would make it easier for genuine fans to access tickets instead of professional touts looking to make a parasitical profit.

Despite the fact that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish said, using bots and other malicious software is illegal, touts do so without fear of prosecution, as no one has yet been prosecuted for using bots for the industrial harvesting of tickets. Artists such as Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift have repeatedly stated that they do not wish for their tickets to be touted. Artists get upset when their loyal fans blame them for not protecting them from touts, even though they do try. Both Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran have gone to great lengths to try to protect their fans from the touts.

Subsections (3) and (4) of proposed new section 92A force touts to clearly state the face value of any ticket listed for resale—again, surely that information should be provided—and to ensure

“the trader or business’s name and trading address are clearly visible, in full, on the first page the ticket is viewable on.”

The information

“must not be hidden behind an icon, a drop down menu or other device”,

which is what actually happens. The Consumer Rights Act states explicitly—these are Lord Moynihan’s reforms, which were added to the 2015 Act—that platforms must legally provide buyers with seat locations, face-value prices and restrictions, for example. They should be provided

“in a clear and comprehensible manner”

and

“before the buyer is bound by the contract for the sale of the ticket.”

Before they purchase, consumers have a right to know what they are buying, and who they are buying it from. That is in current law, but Viagogo has a track record of hiding face value behind what we call “hover text”, or small, tiny icons marked “FV”, so you have to know what you are looking for to find it. It obscures trader identities behind a tiny star icon, and only reveals a trader’s identity after the user enters their credit card details and has gone through the CAPTCHA process, so the user has often committed to buying before they know who they are buying from and what the face value is. That is in straight contravention of the 2015 Act.

On 99.9% of other websites, CAPTCHA is used to protect consumers. On Viagogo, it is used to protect the identity of its commercial suppliers—in other words, touts. Details of any ticket restrictions—for example, the information that resale is only allowed at face value—are provided in an unclear and incomprehensible manner, and are often buried in the middle of other small print, and then negated by claims about Viagogo’s “guarantee”—that is a very loose term if you are on Viagogo’s website.

Those practices are purposely misleading for most, but even more so for those who are visually impaired, tourists who do not speak fluent English, or older people without niche technical skills, who could be buying tickets for a grandchild’s birthday. I have had lots of grandparents in touch with me. As someone said—I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South—they then feel stupid. I have had such a number of emails from people saying, “This is my fault. I was stupid. I should have known better. I should have checked.” We should not allow companies to exist that do this in such a big way. They say, “Buyer beware”; that is Viagogo’s motto, I think. It is probably hidden on its website. What is happening is not right, and it is up to us to protect consumers; that is what Parliament is for. We should not allow this to happen on such a scale.

Furthermore, experts involved with the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse have found that large numbers of sellers are based abroad, or have links to forms of organised crime all the way up to convicted drug dealers, money launderers and bank robbers. The secondary ticketing market is not full of “classic entrepreneurs” as a former Chancellor and former Culture Secretary, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sir Sajid Javid), would have us believe. They are serious criminals. If Members want to see when he said that, it was in 2011 when he was helping to talk out my private Member’s Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Brown]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have families struggling to buy tickets for their children who are desperate to go and see x band or y band, and then they find themselves ripped off and unable to have that treat, which was massively looked forward to.

I give huge credit to my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) for her years of dedicated campaigning in this area. Her work has helped to bring this issue to the forefront of debate, and to make it clear that legal change is necessary to protect our cultural industries and consumers from the touts. We on the Opposition Benches have a clear policy to stamp out ticket touting so that no one is able to charge a large mark-up on resold tickets.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Is it not important to emphasise that this issue needs legislation? Lots of venues have tried their level best to get it right. For instance, the O2 Arena only endorses the use of its reseller, AXS, which is only allowed to sell tickets at 10% above the original price—precisely what we are saying should be available to everybody else—but the venue cannot stop other companies effectively nicking all the tickets because of the use of bots. That is why we need legislation.

[Ms Brown]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. We have tried to nip this in the bud by bringing it to the public’s attention, putting pressure on individuals and encouraging action to be taken, but we need legislation to stamp it out.

I like the fact that in Labour’s proposed legislation there will be an upper limit on the number of tickets that an individual can resell, in order to make organised ticket touting an unprofitable practice. People who honestly buy tickets and then find that they cannot attend should absolutely be allowed to sell their tickets on—that is in the consumer’s interest and the best interests of our constituents—but culture and sports fans should no longer be gouged and exploited. Thankfully, there is a Lords amendment before us today that would ensure that very thing. It was put forward by none other than the Conservative Lord Moynihan. It would go some way to implementing these protections, but despite that the Government seem determined to oppose change and go no further in protecting consumers from ticket touts, even though they acknowledge that the problem persists.

Frankly, I know that my constituents will want to understand why the Government appear determined to stand in the way of greater protections even when they are being put forward by one of their very own noble Lords. Why are the Government ignoring the voices of fan organisations and creatives who want a fair, properly regulated market in event tickets? I think the Minister might have a job of work to do in convincing my constituents that this is about sound regulation rather than the failed free market ideology of the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss). We in this House must not forget the importance of protecting Britons from unfair practices, and we must always remember to put them first.

We know that this is far from the only area where poor regulation of our cultural and media markets poses serious risks to consumers and communities alike, so I want to say a few words about the large number of Lords amendments on the state ownership of our newspapers. I thank my Opposition Front-Bench colleagues for demonstrating leadership and pressing for action on this issue, and I welcome the Government’s amendments in the other place following those calls. It is important that there is now something like cross-party consensus on this, because we live in a world where distrust is stronger and misinformation thrives.

I know that many of us share the fear that genuine, honest journalism is becoming a rare commodity, and the impacts of that are massive right across our society. Failure to promote a trustworthy media landscape fuels conspiracy theories and extremism, and it distracts attention from the genuine, massive challenges that face us as a country and as a world. We should all fear becoming a society that is riven by division, because all our communities lose out from that. I believe that only scammers, extremists and tyrants ultimately benefit.

I am not saying that foreign state ownership of UK newspapers would lead directly to those media outlets spewing division, hate and lies, but I am seriously worried about the further impact it would have on public trust in our media. We all need to recognise the greater potential for interference in our democracy from foreign states if they own media outlets directly.

We cannot just act to block foreign state takeovers of papers—our agenda needs to be wider than that. We need to support impartial and independent public interest journalism through the BBC, including the fabulous World Service, which is so important and currently in significant financial difficulty. We need, obviously, to continue acting to improve the regulation of online social media spaces where, as we know, trust is near extinct and where so much harm is done to the most vulnerable in our communities. Amendments against foreign ownership of newspapers are only a tiny part of the solution, but they are a step forward. I welcome the action taken on this issue in the other place, which has improved the Bill.

Finally, I will speak to some of the wider amendments made in the other place to better protect consumers from scams and exploitation. As we know, the abuse of subscription services by hiding cancellation options affects people in every part of our country. People are steadily losing money, month after month, to services that they do not want but do not know how to cancel. Citizens Advice estimates that £300 million a year is being spent on unwanted subscriptions. Obviously this is of even more concern where people are not completely digitally literate, so I hope the Minister might tell us more about what work is being done to monitor and update the digital inclusion strategy. It is a bit of a shock that there has been no update for about 10 years. According to Age UK, nearly 6 million older people, including many of my constituents, cannot use the internet.

One constituent recently told me about how they missed a hospital appointment because they lost the message telling them about it. We all know that this is all too common, and that it creates unnecessary and unfair barriers to accessing so many of our public services and just taking part in everyday life.

Frankly, the examples I have seen show that anybody can be impacted, because it is often massively harder to cancel a subscription agreement than to enter one. That is just blatant and egregious, and it is difficult for any of us to navigate. Additional protections in law simply cannot come soon enough, and there is widespread recognition that greater clarity is needed in regulations. Regulators will obviously need to be more active in holding the providers of subscription services to account where they use exploitative tactics against consumers. The test is whether the Bill will deliver that.

I welcome the debate in the other place on how this will be implemented in law and, slightly unusually, I give credit to the Minister in the other place for rightly engaging with probing amendments and for seeking to maintain stronger protections for consumers. I hope the Minister here today will say more about where the Bill ultimately stands. Will the regulator have the clarity and confidence it needs to start enforcing against exploitative practices, or will we be back here in a few years after the regulations have been tested and found sadly wanting?

I argue that the lack of a clear prohibition on creating fake reviews was an omission from the original Bill. Shadow Ministers and Opposition colleagues have called for greater clarity on that since Second Reading, almost a year ago, so I welcome the measures that have now been included. In our everyday lives, when we look for goods and services online, many of us have little alternative but to rely on reviews. Fake reviews are clearly a massive threat to genuine competition, and they are effectively an open door for scammers and cowboys to rip people off further. Again, I hope the Minister might say a little more on the final position.

There was significant debate in the other place on probing amendments that questioned whether stronger provisions were needed, particularly on the responsibilities of platforms and internet service providers that host fake reviews. Is the Minister absolutely confident that those platforms are clear about the actions they must take to stop their services being abused by fake review scammers?

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

With the leave of the House, I will respond to some of the points raised in this fruitful, constructive debate. I reassure the shadow Minister that I have lost none of my mojo or ambition to ensure a fair and level playing field for businesses. That is a vital part of this legislation. At times I may smile when I am at the Dispatch Box and there are a couple of reasons for that; not only am I generally a happy guy but I am pleased to see this groundbreaking legislation being brought into effect. It is probably one of only two major pieces of legislation around the world that does what it does. We should welcome that and the fair and level playing field that will result from it.

I do not accept what the shadow Minister says about the Government having caved in and weakened some of the Bill’s provisions. It is fair to say that some of the platforms would like us to have changed the Bill radically from how it was when it was presented to Parliament. We think we have very much held the line on its provisions and how it will ensure that consumers and smaller businesses get a better deal. We do not accept that it will bring about “bleed back”, as he puts it, between the on-the-merits provisions of penalties and other regulatory decisions. We have been clear on that and our legal advice is of the same mind.

Secondary ticketing is a key part of the debate, having been raised by various Members. We absolutely see that there is good practice in some primary markets, where there is control as to resales. We should learn from best practice, such as ID requirements on the resale of tickets. That is within the gift of those in the primary markets, so we are keen to develop the review to ensure that we look at both the primary and secondary markets, as the Opposition called for in an amendment tabled earlier in the Bill’s progress.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I am grateful to the Cheshire cat for giving way. Does he oppose the Lords amendment on ticket touts because of the proposed new subsection stating that there needs to be “proof of purchase” for secondary ticket marketing, or because details of the “face value” of the ticket have to be provided? It is difficult to determine why the Minister opposes the Lords amendment other than because it is an inconvenience to government.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

We believe that those measures, such as on the face value of the ticket, are already covered by the current legislation and enforcement. The Government have certainly gone a lot further than previous regimes have: we strengthened the terms and guidance in 2017; we banned ticketing bots—the hon. Gentleman mentioned that but did not seem to understand that it had been outlawed in 2018; and we improved enforcement action by the regulators, as we have seen six successful prosecutions under the new regime. I remind him that where other jurisdictions have supposedly gone further in banning resale, such as in Ireland, no prosecutions have taken place. We are trying to ensure that we have a balance and that our provisions work well.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I will address the hon. Lady’s points in a moment, as I am keen to respond to some of them.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

If the Minister goes to the Viagogo website and tries to buy a ticket, he will see on the first page that it says the ticket is £420 or whatever. Can he see the original value of the ticket? No. Can he see whether it is a validly purchased ticket? No. That is the problem that the amendment would solve. It would be simple for the Government to agree to the amendment and then we can get the Bill through.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

We believe those provisions are already there. I have quite happily used Viagogo on many occasions, as other people have when reselling tickets. Of course we will keep looking at the primary and secondary markets, and at the interaction between the two, so that we can develop the right way to regulate the market, in a future Parliament.