Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 21st May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The concern is that we would simply drive people into a black market; that seems to have happened in Ireland. The CMA has said that capping prices, which is what the Opposition want, would not reduce the incentive to resell, for exactly the reasons my hon. Friend has pointed out, so through the Bill, we are taking the pragmatic step of increasing the enforcement of current regulations, while also looking at the wider picture, in the review, to see whether improvements can be made. We think that is the right balance.

In conclusion, I encourage this House to agree with the Government’s position on Lords amendment 104B, and accept the Government’s proposed amendments (a) and (b) in lieu. It is imperative that Royal Assent be achieved without further delay, so that the legislation can be implemented and the Bill’s benefits realised as quickly as possible.

[Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I beg to move manuscript amendment (a), leave out from “House” and insert

“agrees with the Lords in their Amendment”.

I confess that I am completely perplexed as to why the Government have adopted the attitude that they have taken today. The Bill could have gone through both Houses quite easily and have steamed ahead to Royal Assent if they had simply agreed to these very minor recommendations from the House of Lords. We do something very similar to what the amendment suggests in relation to Olympics tickets, partly because the Olympics’ organisers insist on such legislation for any Olympics, but we also do something very similar for sporting events. The question of why we do not do exactly the same for music, comedy and other events is legitimate.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

The Minister has only just sat down, but now he is intervening on me.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I just wanted to address one of the points that the hon. Gentleman makes. He talks about the Olympics, for which there was a complete ban on resale. Is that what he is proposing?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

No. If the Minister will listen for a few more minutes, I will get on to precisely what we recommend. Indeed, he may remember that in the last debate on this issue, I said very clearly that we do not intend to ban all resale. If somebody has a ticket that they bought themselves, not through a bot, but is unable to use it and wants to resell it, that should be a perfectly legitimate process, but the price should be capped at a sensible level—at something like 10% or 15% above the original cost.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Indeed. I will come to authorised resale later, because it is a real problem with the way that the market operates. Fans are very unclear whether the ticket they have bought through the secondary market is authorised by the original vendor—that is, the venue or one of its authorised vendors—and therefore whether they will actually be admitted in the end. That is one of the problems: even when fans are paying very inflated prices, they are not certain that the ticket they are buying is a genuine ticket that will gain them admittance to the event they have paid for.

Over the years, Members have repeatedly given evidence—

[Sir Philip Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I ask the hon. Gentleman to let me make a little progress. I am still on the first sentence of my speech.

Over the years, Members have repeatedly given evidence that the secondary ticket market is not working: with tickets advertised with no declaration as to whether they are real, or of their face value; websites that only declare the face value of a ticket at the very last stage, with a clock ticking away and the fan already hooked; fake tickets being sold, leaving consumers out of pocket and completely in the lurch; tickets sold without evidence of proof of purchase, or of the seller’s title to the tickets; and websites circumventing artists and venues’ policies on the resale of tickets.

Taylor Swift tickets with a face value of £75 are presently selling on Viagogo for £6,840. If a Foo Fighters fan from the Rhondda wanted to buy a ticket to see them at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, it would have cost them £95 direct from that stadium; on Viagogo today, that exact same ticket would cost them £395. If a child from the Rhondda who loves space and hopes to one day become an aeronautical engineer wanted to see “Tim Peake: Astronauts - The Quest to Explore Space” at Swansea Arena, they would have paid £48.75 face value; on Viagogo, they would have to find £134. This is about much more than just price gouging and ripping people off from their hard-earned money: it is robbing children of their chance to be inspired, to spark a creative idea, to see a career in our growing creative industries, or to learn from an expert. That is why I wish the Government were adopting the measure passed by the House of Lords.

Fans, the people who really create the value, are being excluded from live concerts. The UK’s secondary ticketing market is estimated to be worth £1 billion annually, but it is rife with fraud and scamming, which affects people every single day. I would not even mind if just some of the inflated price money went into the creative industries, and into training young people and providing them with a creative education, but not a single penny of it does. It is set to get worse, too: ticketing security expert Reg Walker has reported “a massive escalation” of harvesting using software. People who have long used bots to bulk-buy items such as iPhones are now turning to ticket touting because it is more profitable, and according to Reg Walker, there is a new generation of young, tech-savvy armchair touts

“smashing ticket systems to bits”.

It is a market that simply does not work, and Labour will fix it.

The Lords have given us a perfectly sensible measure. Their amendment establishes a legal requirement that secondary ticketing facilities must not permit a trade or business to list tickets without evidence of proof of purchase or evidence of title, a matter not mentioned by the Minister. It forbids a reseller from selling more tickets to an event than they can legally purchase on the primary market. It requires the face value of any ticket listed for resale, and the trader or business’s name and trading address, to be clearly visible in full on the first page on which a purchaser can view the ticket—I have had a bit of debate with the Minister about that proposal, so I will come on to the specifics later. It also requires the Government to lay before Parliament the outcomes of a review of the effect of these measures on the secondary ticketing market within nine months of Royal Assent. I cannot understand why any sane person would oppose such a measure, unless it was purely and simply for ideological reasons.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

On such ideological reasons, the Conservative party claims to be the party of Adam Smith, but if we read “The Wealth of Nations”, we see that the behaviour of the rentier class is not exactly praised by Adam Smith, and this is pure rent seeking. As the hon. Gentleman said, this is taking a ticket at £75, charging 90 times that and doing nothing to add any value at all. This is rent seeking, and ideologically it should be opposed by the Conservative party.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

The hon. Member makes a very good point. Indeed, in the main the market is a good thing—it can operate to produce good and efficient outcomes in society—but in this case the market is not working, and where the market does not work, the state has to intervene.

I cannot understand why any sane person should oppose such a measure, but unfortunately the Government have. Their amendment (a) in lieu is a weak sock puppet of a concession. It does not strengthen the rules; it simply leaves them in place. It does not prevent tickets from being sold without evidence of proof of purchase or the seller’s title to the tickets. It does not limit the quantity of resale tickets to the original number limited by the seller or artist. It leaves in place the current system for showing the face value of a ticket, despite the fact that section 90(8) of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, in my view and in the view of everybody who has spoken to Members about this, is very opaque and open to interpretation—or, I would argue, open to deliberate misinterpretation by the secondary ticketing market.

For instance, Viagogo does not say “face value”, but has a little box that says “FV”, which is not explained anywhere on the website, and people have to click on that. If Viagogo genuinely wanted to be open and transparent, it would say “face value”, and put the price at the very beginning. StubHub is similarly advertising tickets for Taylor Swift on 21 June at £711, but nowhere on the first page does it give the face value. I note that, if someone goes on to the second page, it says $75 there, but I am told that that is not the actual cost of the ticket. Seatsnet has tickets for Murrayfield—for Taylor Swift again—selling at £1,294.79 or £1,092.15 each, and nowhere does it give the face value of the tickets. Interestingly, AEG Presents and AXS, which are managing the tickets for the concerts at Murrayfield, say that tickets are strictly not to be resold:

“Any tickets found to be purchased via re-sale on the non-official secondary market will not be valid for entry into the concerts.”

In other words, it is completely in doubt whether the tickets being sold at £711 or £1,294 are tickets that will actually gain admittance for an individual.

[James Wild (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman referred to Viagogo, and I have just gone on to its website. He mentioned the “FV” symbol, but when I click on it, it tells me the face value of the ticket. Did I misunderstand the point he made?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Yes, the hon. Member did misunderstand the point I made. Why does it not just say “face value”, instead of “FV”, which would be perfectly simple? For that matter, why should people have to click on it? The point of the Lords amendment is very clear, and it is that people should know from the very first time they see the ticket what the face value of that ticket is. I am perfectly happy, if people want to be scammed, that they should be free to be scammed, but they should at least know from the very first point at which they seek to buy a ticket what the face value of the ticket is.

[Sir Philip Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I will give way to the hon. Member, although I am keen to move on.

[Sir Philip Davies]

I am very grateful. As the hon. Gentleman was struggling so much with the previous intervention, I thought I would intervene and give him a way out. If he gets his way, all that will happen is that all of these tickets sold on the secondary market will be sold by spivs outside the location of an event. Why does the hon. Gentleman think that consumers will be better protected by spivs selling these tickets outside the event than by their being sold on official secondary ticket markets?

[Mrs Hodgson]

Because of the scale!

[Sir Chris Bryant]

The secondary ticket market is the spivs: it is precisely the same set of people scamming the system and the public. They are taking advantage of people’s desire to get tickets, and thereby making the market simply not work in the interests of the creators of the art, the fans, or the stadiums and venues themselves. That is why we want to take action.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right about the market not working. The point that has been missed hugely by Conservative Members is that a finite number of tickets are going on sale, and this finite number is being gobbled up by the spivs, speculators and whoever online. He mentions the guys outside a venue, but they can only hold so many tickets. It is the scale of this, as I heard the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) say from a sedentary position. Without the Lords amendment that has been proposed, this is being allowed on an industrial scale. Why are the Government and the Conservative party willing to see people ripped off? It is just unbelievable.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I rather agree with the idea that some Conservative Members actually want people to be ripped off, and maybe that is what we have seen for the last 14 years when we have seen taxes rise, but what we get for the taxes has diminished.

The Minister says that he wants to give more powers to the CMA to be able to enforce the action. The problem with that is that the CMA itself gave evidence that, when it tried to take Viagogo to court, it came up against inherent weaknesses in the existing consumer protection toolkit, and the Government are not adding anything to that consumer protection toolkit whatsoever. Indeed, they are deliberately voting down precisely what they said they wanted.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

No, the Minister will get to reply afterwards, I am sure. [Hon. Members: “Oh!”] So the Minister is begging. I will give way to his begging.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I beg the hon. Member’s leave, but can I draw his attention to the comments of the CMA before the Bill Committee? One witness said exactly this in response to the point he has just raised:

“We think that many of the changes in the Bill will address those weaknesses directly by giving us civil fining powers for the first time.”––[Official Report, Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill Public Bill Committee, 13 June 2023; c. 7, Q3.]

It is not right to say that the CMA is getting no more ability to oversee this regime.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

No, because I read that completely differently from the way the Minister does. If the Minister were right, why is it only at this stage that he has chosen to bring forward amendment (a) in lieu? Precisely as with every single step of the way on ticket touting that we have seen over the last 14 years, somebody moves an amendment in the House of Lords—quite often Lord Moynihan, wonderful man that he is—and the Government are dragged kicking and screaming to introduce sensible measures that have cross-party support, but that the Government object to for some bizarre ideological reasons.

Labour will strengthen the consumer rights legislation to protect fans from fraudulent ticket practices, restricting the resale of more tickets than permissible and ensuring anybody buying a ticket from the secondary market can see—clearly, easily, readily and absolutely unambiguously —what the original price of that ticket was and where it came from. All of this could have been done today if the Government had not rejected the Lords amendment, but supported Labour on the cross-party amendment from the Lords. However, they have put touts before fans, and profits before the public.

If Labour is given the chance to form a Government, we will also go further. We will restrict the resale of tickets at more than a small set percentage over the price the original purchaser paid for it. No more touts buying a £50 ticket and selling it on for £500; no more bulk buying of seats for Taylor Swift concerts that could go to a 13-year-old fan from Wigan, but instead go to a millionaire from the US. No more scalping of our creative industries and artists, who set reasonable prices for their tickets, only to find somebody else making money off their talent and hard work by reselling them at 10 times the price. Ministers say that the CMA will enforce more, but I doubt that anything will change as a result of anything the Government are intending to do with this measure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

With the leave of the House, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will address the points that have been raised during the debate.

The hon. Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) presented a cap on ticket prices as his solution to this problem, but that flies in the face of the evidence given by the CMA in its report. It said that such a measure would not significantly diminish the incentive, and the misconduct would therefore continue. However, it was good to hear the hon. Gentleman finally admit that the market is a good thing—that, coming from an Opposition Member, is a revelation.

There is a common factor between what was said by the hon. Gentleman and what was said by the other contributors to the debate. He said, for instance, that face value was not made sufficiently clear on the various secondary sites, but there is a key saying clearly what face value is on the first pages of the Viagogo and StubHub websites. All those points relate to one thing and one thing only, namely enforcement, because the requirements are there in the existing legislation. We are keen to bolster enforcement. He says that we are somehow kicking and screaming to do so with this amendment, despite the fact that this Government have unilaterally brought forward this legislation. Part 3 offers huge new powers that were not added through an amendment in the Commons or the Lords; they were on the face of the Bill from day one.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

The Minister knows that Taylor Swift tickets are being sold. The organisers of those concerts have said that tickets sold on unauthorised secondary ticket markets are not valid. Would he therefore encourage people to buy tickets only from authorised ticket vendors and not from those that are unauthorised, which include Viagogo?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I would certainly advise any consumer to comply with the rules set out by the primary market. It is quite clear that the primary markets can do a lot more about restricting secondary sales, and we have been quoted examples of that today, including the way the Olympics was run, the way that football matches are run and the way that Glastonbury is run. All those things have very tight controls on secondary markets, which is in the gift of the primary market.

The hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) asked about resources, as did the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil). The CMA’s budget is £122 million, so we feel that it has the necessary resources available to it. The fines and penalties can be kept by the CMA for its enforcement activities.

The hon. Members for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) and for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) made similar points about the inappropriate resale of tickets—for England football matches, for example—and refunds that have not been processed properly. Only six people have been prosecuted for abuse in this sector, and we want to see more. Prosecutions for the use of bots have not been brought forward, and the amendment allows the CMA to do that. All the concrete action that the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South calls for is about enforcement, not more regulations. I absolutely agree with that, and we want to ensure that there is more enforcement in this space.

It is of paramount importance that we get this Bill on to the statute book so that it can start delivering for businesses and consumers as soon as possible. I thank all who have helped to get to this place, including the Clerks, the officials in the Department and the Bill team. I thank them for their hard work on this legislation, and I hope that all Members will feel able to support our position.

Question put, That the amendment be made.