Secondary Ticketing Market

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism (Chris Bryant)]

It is a great delight to see you in your seat, Mr Rosindell, not least because we have been knocking around these parts as MPs for about the same time. It pays to hang on in there, doesn’t it? It is a great delight to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cramlington and Killingworth (Emma Foody) on securing this debate. This is an innovation that I have started in the last few debates that we have had here: I am going to try to answer the questions that hon. Members have put to the Minister as much as I possibly can.

[Dr Evans]

Hear, hear!

[Chris Bryant]

Hang on. In the words of Shania Twain, “That don’t impress me much”.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cramlington and Killingworth asked what we can do under the current legislation. It is a frustration, certainly for this Minister—I am not sure that previous Ministers felt it—that although several different bodies could bring forward prosecutions, the number of prosecutions has been so few. I fully understand why trading standards has struggled, because for the last 14 years, local authorities have had difficult budgets and sometimes it has not had the resources that it needs to take forward these issues.

It is not for me to directly tell trading standards or the CMA when to take action— we believe in the separation of powers, so that would be completely inappropriate —but the more that the prosecuting authorities feel able to act in this sphere, the better. If they want to come to me and say that they do not have the powers or the resources that they need, I am happy to hear that and we can act on that basis, but it is frustrating that I cannot tell them to act in individual cases.

[Dr Luke Evans]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will not, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind, because I will try to answer all the questions. I will come on to his questions later.

One key matter that we will have to get right—if and when we bring forward legislation in this field—is enforcement, because there is no point bringing forward new lews if we cannot enforce them. We made manifesto commitments during the general election that we are absolutely determined to implement. As for when they will be implemented in legislation, we have had one King’s Speech; there will be another one coming along. I do not want to tell the Leader of the House precisely who will have what Bills at what time, because I might not stay in my post if I keep doing that, but if there is a Bill at some point, we will have to ensure that we sort out the enforcement issue. That is one element on which we will be consulting.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cramlington and Killingworth said that this issue is not at the top of the list of Government priorities. Whenever I post about it on X, people say, “Bryant, get on with doing the things that really matter to your constituents.” Well, this is one of those issues. The Government can do more than one thing at the same time. This is part of a panoply of measures that we need to implement to ensure that we put fans back at the heart of music, live events and sport. It is part of a wider Government strategy to rejig the economy so that it works for all of us. As my hon. Friend quoted:

“What is a club in any case?...It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging”.

It is fundamentally about the fans. They are the people who have created the value, and it is despicable that they are not able to benefit from it.

The hon. Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) made the point that things have got worse since 2012. I think she is right, which is why it was a bit cheeky of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans), to pretend that they had not been in government for 14 years, and to actually praise the previous Government for taking no action in this area. We are determined to take the necessary action, and I hope that the hon. Member for Chelmsford and her party will support those measures.

My hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson) used the word “parasite” at one point. On the “Today” programme, someone was saying that leeches have had great difficulty reproducing of late, but that they have discovered a new way. I do not want to overstate this metaphor, but we could argue that what we see in the secondary market is a form of leeching off the creative endeavours and the fan-led passion of so many others.

I will give some more examples. “Vampire” is my favourite of Olivia Rodrigo’s songs. We can get tickets for her concert in Manchester on 1 July next year on StubHub for £1,506, with a face value of £200. If we go to Viagogo, the price is £2,573 for exactly the same event—almost identical tickets, just a few rows in. That ticket’s face value, which we find only once we have gone two thirds of the way through the process with Viagogo, is £50. That is a shocking 5,146% increase. We can buy tickets for James Blunt—everybody knows I am not a great fan of his and he is no great fan of mine—that have a face value of £105 for £327 on StubHub.

It is not just about music: the England versus South Africa autumn international rugby tickets for 16 November, with a face value of £145, cost £889 on Viagogo. We should tell the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who I think is the world’s greatest Bruce Springsteen fan, that tickets with a face value of £150 are selling on Gigsberg for £1,044.08. Tickets for the world darts championship being held at Alexandra Palace on 30 December this year, with a face value of £55, are £248 on Gigsberg. I could go on, because this is an endless daily source of—frankly—racketeering based on a fundamental unfairness, and that is what we want to put right.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Jack Abbott) and I have talked about several issues in relation to the creative industries in his constituency. He made the point about Ed Sheeran, whom I think has made Framlingham castle more famous for him than for Queen Mary, which is quite an accomplishment after so many hundreds of years. That is also part of our tourism industry, as people want to go to Framlingham castle to see the place that “Castle on the Hill” was written about, so we need to capitalise on that. But we cannot if none of the money ends up going back into the creative industries or even into the local economy, and simply goes off into a black hole.

[Mrs Hodgson]

I do not want this debate to end without mentioning Ed Sheeran and how much he has done to try to tackle the scourge of ticket touting. Lots of other artists, such as Iron Maiden, Arctic Monkeys, Mumford & Sons and many others have tried, but Ed Sheeran went above and beyond by cancelling tickets when they had been resold. Taylor Swift never did that because she did not want to break the hearts of all her fans, but Ed Sheeran has been a real warrior in that regard.

[Chris Bryant]

Absolutely; that is a well-made point. Indeed, several other artists are moving in the same direction and I encourage more artists to go down that route. In the end, we need to get to a place where the face value is the face value and where other people are not racketeering on the back of that. Sometimes, the artist gets it in the neck because people think they have enabled it to happen, but that is profoundly unfair.

Incidentally, my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South also referred to Sam Fender. I am afraid that when Sam Fender was on at St James’s Park, I was watching P!nk at the Stadium of Light. Interestingly, having two massive gigs on at the same time had a dramatic effect on the local economy in the north-east, which is really important. There are issues for the whole visitor economy that need to be looked at, and I had an interesting conversation with all the local authorities and the new mayor, thinking about how we can make sure that the visitor economy works for everybody when such big events are going on at the same time. Part of that has to be about making sure that the money that is currently going out of the door and never ending up in the local economy does end up there.

My hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley)—she is a great friend and we have known each other a long time—spoke about going to see Cliff Richard. I once saw Cliff Richard live, but it was at a wedding and we did not have to pay. He did not sing “Congratulations”, which we thought was going to come along at any moment. My hon. Friend made a point about sudden changes in prices just as we get to the checkout. Of course, we would be absolutely furious if that happened in Sainsbury’s, Tesco or Morrisons. Why should we be any less furious when it happens on a website?

I was looking at tickets on StubHub earlier, when suddenly it said, “Your price is locked in.” Well, I thought that was the price. What do they mean when they say it is locked in? This is crazy; it is a deliberate attempt to make us stick and keep on buying the ticket, even when we have realised that we are buying something for 5,146% of its original face-value price, because that is the point at which we learn that that is the face value. This is completely wrong; it is not the market working in the interests of humanity, but humanity having to serve the market in an inappropriate way.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) made some really significant points. Many of us are making identical points, but that strengthens the argument that we need to take action in this space, and we are absolutely determined to do so. We will do it in a responsible way, and we want to make sure that every single element of the legislation that we eventually bring forward works, does what it says on the tin and is able to be enforced. That is why we will launch a consultation in the very near future, and I very much hope that many hon. Members will want to take part in the discussion about precisely how that consultation ends up being framed.

I think this debate is the second or third outing the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) and I have had against each other. One cannot just blame one’s partner for one’s musical choices. That is like the moment in Genesis when Adam says,

“The woman beguiled me and I did eat”

after eating the forbidden fruit. I am not sure that Jason Donovan is the forbidden fruit, but if the hon. Member likes Jason Donovan, he should just own up to it. It is fine; we will not think any the less of him for going to see Jason Donovan all the time.

The hon. Member basically read out the list of things from the last debate that I said we wanted to do, so I am delighted that he agrees with me or that we agree with him. When it comes to the legislation and the consultation process, I very much hope that he will want to feed in. If there are things that we need to amend, just to make sure that we have got them right, we will do that.

The hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth started off extremely badly, because he basically dissed Tom Jones, who is from Pontypridd—it’s not unusual, but I do not think it is very well advised. He asked a series of questions. He asked, “When?” I have already said that it will be soon. It will be in the autumn, and I reckon that the autumn is already upon us, so it will be soon or imminent—he can choose any word he likes, but it will be soon. Patience is a virtue.

The hon. Member asked whether the private Member’s Bill being advanced by one of my colleagues is a handout Bill. No, it is not a handout Bill; it is a Bill advanced by a private Member. He also asked whether there will be a cap on prices. We already said during the general election that that is our intended direction of travel. It is a moot point precisely what level that cap should be set at, because I do not want to completely ban people from selling tickets. If someone has bought four tickets but suddenly only two people can go, because somebody is ill or they have to change the dates, it is perfectly legitimate that they should be able to sell the tickets on. They might also want to be able to recoup not only the cost of the tickets themselves but some additional costs. That is one of the things we want to consult on, and what would be a suitable cap. I note the point that has been made about a level of 20%, which some people think is too high. Some people think that 10% would be too high; some people think that it would be too low. We need to make sure we get the level right. And of course we will analyse the situation in Ireland.

As we have all been announcing what gigs we have been to this year, let me say that, in addition to P!nk, who I have been to see three times now:

“What about us?

What about all the plans that ended in disaster?”

I went to see Depeche Mode in Cologne—the Germans just couldn’t get enough. And on Saturday night, I went to see Bronski Beat, on the 40th anniversary of the album “Age of Consent” coming out. That goes to the heart of why music can be so important: there must be hundreds of thousands of people in this country who remember when “Age of Consent” came out 40 years ago and how it completely transformed their understanding of themselves and who they could be in life. Being able to go to a live gig to celebrate that with lots of other people is completely transformative, and that is what I want to be available for as many people in this country as possible at a sensible, safe and sane price, rather than people being excluded because some people have much deeper pockets than others.

For me, to use a Welsh term—if it is okay with the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth for me to use a Welsh term and to refer to Welsh artists—this is about chwarae teg, or fair play. Fair play is all I am looking for in this market. First, we need transparency on price along the whole process. When a ticket comes up in the secondary market, people should be able to know what the face value of that ticket is from the beginning and what the deal is. Secondly, we need genuine equality at that 9 o’clock moment when everybody goes online to start bidding for tickets. The hoovering-up of tickets brings the word “hoover” into disrepute. It was striking that all the Coldplay tickets had gone in 40 minutes and yet, even before all of them had gone, tickets were being sold for £2,916 on the secondary market. That is clear evidence that something is awry with the way the system works.

Also, where there is an excessive increase in the secondary market, as we have referred to, that is just wholly inappropriate. It prices people out and, as many Members have said, it does not mean that any of the money goes back into the creative industries or the local economy, which is highly problematic.

I want openness in dynamic pricing. People should be able to understand from the very beginning if that is the process they are entering into. Originally, we were going to consult only on what precise measures we should bring forward in relation to the secondary market, but we are now looking at dynamic pricing. As several Members have said, there are versions of dynamic pricing that do work, and we do not want to ban those. I would argue that the early-bird tickets available for the Rhondda arts festival in my constituency—I suppose I should declare an interest—are a perfectly legitimate part of the whole equation. They sometimes bring money into venues early on, and we do not want to ban that.

We are not looking at dynamic pricing in the whole of the economy, but simply in relation to live events. Because that was not a manifesto commitment before the general election, we will be doing a call for evidence. If people have evidence of where the dynamic pricing model is not working and is counterproductive to the market, please get in touch.

I praise some of the action taken by some of the artists in the industry, which has been referred to. It looks like that is everything—no, there is one thing more I want to say.

[Dr Evans]

So close.

[Chris Bryant]

And yet so far. Change is coming. I say to all the people I have referred to—Gigsberg, Viagogo, StubHub, Ticketmaster and all the rest—that change is coming, so they should start getting ready for it, because that is what we are determined to deliver.