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.