Canterbury City Council Bill

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, as always, for his intervention, but on this occasion he is absolutely wrong.

This is the last group of amendments that we will debate on this Bill. In fact, the amendments relate not only to the Canterbury City Council Bill, but to all the Bills that we are discussing. It is right at this stage to pay tribute to everybody who has participated in these debates.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I have had the pleasure of listening to my hon. Friend on these subjects for a number of years. When I was the Opposition spokesman, I advocated looking at these issues on a national basis so that individual councils did not have to come forward with different Bills. Would that not be a much more sensible approach?

[Mr Chope]

Absolutely. We have made progress in that regard. When these Bills were first debated, the Labour Government were reluctant to do anything about it, but under the present Government we have had a new consultation paper on the whole subject. That paper makes it clear that the Government’s view is that there may be a strong case for national legislation instead of piecemeal legislation.

The Government have said that if they have to change the legislation to ensure that all the local Acts and the Bills that we are discussing today comply with the EU services directive, they will include the provisions that are put forward by each local authority before the end of the consultation period later this month in collective legislation to ensure that the provisions relating to the rights and responsibilities of pedlars are common throughout the land.

One benefit of this debate having been extended over almost a six-year period is that we have had the chance to consider the impact of the services directive, which, among other things, applies to touting for services, which is the subject of this group of Lords amendments. As my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) will remember, when we raised the issue of the services directive initially, there was much scepticism among Government Members and people like my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) who have sponsored these Bills. They said that we were raising the services directive as a red herring in order to waste time.

We have now found out that the Government are taking the matter so seriously that they have realised that all the pedlars Acts may have to be repealed to facilitate compliance with the services directive. That implies that when the former Government first thought about the impact of the services directive on the United Kingdom, they and their advisers got it completely wrong. They should surely have understood the implications of the directive when it was being negotiated in Brussels. That is just another example of how we have lost control over our own affairs through the loss of sovereignty, which is being passed to the European Union.

All’s well that ends well in the sense that the Government now recognise that many of the services provisions in these Bills are wholly inappropriate. I suspect that even if my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury had not offered, when the Canterbury City Council Bill was before the House on Third Reading, to withdraw the touting provisions in the other place, it would have been necessary to take them out anyway because of their lack of compliance with the services directive.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Is there not something ironic about the European Union coming to the rescue of my hon. Friend to sort this matter out?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We have had a good round-up of the Bill and I know that the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) is now desperate to get back to discussing the amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker. That is the first time any hon. Member in my seven or eight years in the House has ever said or indicated that they want to hear a little more from me. It certainly has been a red letter day for me, too. I am flattered, Mr Deputy Speaker.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch makes a good point. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister exactly what is in the Government’s mind. Perhaps she will explain why the amendment should be supported and why the wording should apply to the Canterbury City Council Bill but not to the Reading Borough Council Bill.

Perhaps the Minister will also tell us what the Government’s view is of the principle of touting tickets and so on. The Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport published a report on ticket touting in 2008. I am lucky enough to serve on that Committee, so it is a subject close to my heart. People will have spotted that what is striking about that report is the date—it came out in the middle of the discussions on the Bill. I do not know whether their lordships were influenced in any way by the recommendations of the Committee—I very much hope they were; it was an excellent report, so that may well be the case—or whether they were influenced by the Bill’s principles, but hon. Members may wish to bear in mind the fact that this is a very strange clause in the sense that it is called “Touting”, and that is what is referred to throughout the clause.

The first recommendation of the Select Committee’s report—of course, I will not go through all the recommendations, but it is wise to highlight some of the pertinent ones—states:

“It is important to bear in mind that the term ‘touting’ has very different meanings to different people”.

When we have a Bill that refers to “touting” as if we all know what touting is, hon. Members should bear in mind that comment by the Committee.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I had always understood that the term “touting” usually related to tickets for sporting events. Could my hon. Friend explain how the word covers that use, as well as the use in the Bill?

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I will just say in passing that I very much agreed with his earlier intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch when he said that these matters are best dealt with at a national level. We are either in favour of ticket touting or we are not, and the same rules should apply across the country. Like my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), I think that many people will believe that touting relates mainly to sporting events, or perhaps even big music events, which is maybe one of the reasons why it is in, for example, the Reading Bill in the first place, as it has a big music festival.

My hon. Friend will be interested to know that clause 11(2) talks about affecting

“Any person who, in a place designated under this section”—

I mentioned briefly about the areas that apply—

“importunes any person by touting for a hotel, lodging house, restaurant or other place of refreshment, for a shop, for a theatre or nightclub or other place of amusement or recreation, or for a boat or other conveyance shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale.”

Straight away, my hon. Friend will appreciate that this goes far beyond what he and many other people might think of it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful for that guidance. It has saved me from having to deal with that particular intervention

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Does my hon. Friend think that Mr Deputy Speaker’s ruling applies only to Conservative leaflets, or will it apply to Labour leaflets as well?

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

As ever, my hon. Friend makes a good point. He is renowned in the House for defending individual freedom. Of course, if people wish to be encouraged into a place, that is a matter for their free choice, but if people go too far, they would be breaking the law. Those practices may well lead people to want to stop touting altogether.

Some people think that touting acts against the interests of the general public. This brings us to the crux of the argument about whether in principle we should find touting acceptable or unacceptable, as well as back to the point my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds made about the touting of tickets for sporting events. Touts mop up tickets for extremely popular events at a low price or at face value and sell them on at an inflated price to the general public who could not get their hands on them because the touts were buying up all the stock. In effect, the general public—the fan or the person who genuinely wants to go—end up having to pay above the odds for their tickets, which people find unsavoury. The Select Committee took a great deal of evidence on that. Indeed, there has been a great deal of concern about this issue and interest in it.

As it happens, it was not just the Select Committee that looked into the issue. The Office of Fair Trading has also investigated whether ticket touting should be stopped because it acts against the interests of the consumer. After many months of inquiry, the Office of Fair Trading found—this was consistent with the evidence it gave us during our inquiry—that, on the whole, touting acts in the best interests of the consumer, and it does so on a number of levels. In many cases, someone who has bought a ticket for an event that they genuinely hope to go to, but who finds that for some reason they cannot go, will be refused a refund by those who sold them the ticket because it is non-returnable. That person is left with a ticket—it could be an expensive ticket—that they cannot do anything with. What are they expected to do? Their only hope is what is known as the secondary market, which is what is known colloquially as touting. Indeed, I am rather surprised that clause 11 is entitled “Touting”. I think that “Secondary market” would probably be a fairer name.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

As I have listened to this debate my understanding of the word “touting” has been considerably expanded. I want to test what it means in the context of this Bill. If I were a pedlar in Canterbury and I started distributing leaflets on people’s doorsteps, would I be caught by this Bill for touting?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend asks a fair question. In effect, he stumbles—whether intentionally or not—on to quite an interesting point about this Bill. In many respects, this part of the Bill has nothing to do with pedlars, because it need not be a pedlar who is selling the tickets. The term “pedlar” has a legal definition—it refers to someone who needs a licence—whereas the Bill as it stands, if Lords amendment C15 was not accepted, would apply to anybody, whether a pedlar or not.