Consumer Rights Bill

Ian Swales Excerpts

Monday 12th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

As far as I understand, that is exactly what the son of John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister, did in Hull. As I recall, he bought a whole street of houses in Hull for a ridiculously low price and sold them on at a higher price afterwards. That is what happens. I know the hon. Gentleman is a socialist too, so I would not expect him to believe in the free market. However, Members on the Conservative Benches are supposed at least to consider themselves believers in the free market. If they agree with the Lords, and in particular with the hon. Lady’s amendment, I do not really see how they can justify that.

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

As usual, the hon. Gentleman is making an entertaining speech. One thing that has moved on since the date of some of the reports he mentions is IT. A constituent of mine told me last night that he tried to get a ticket for a Mark Knopfler concert in Newcastle. Even though he logged on to the website from the first second, he simply could not get a ticket. He ended up seeing one on the secondary market that he could not afford. He then found some tickets on the primary market that were being sold physically at half the price. Does he agree that IT is part of the problem?

[Philip Davies]

I am not saying that IT is part of the problem or part of the solution. IT is part of the real world. That is what we deal with and IT can benefit people. For example, people can put bids on things on eBay and then go to bed. This is what happens with technology: people make the best use of it.

Event promoters have many of the solutions in their own hands. Selling all their tickets in five minutes flat creates a secondary market. If promoters are so bothered about the secondary market and ticket touting for a popular event, it may be more sensible for them to start selling tickets in dribs and drabs. There would then still be tickets available to genuine people right up to the day of the event. They do not do that, of course. For cash-flow reasons, they want to get all the money in on day one. It is no good them saying that they want to get all the money in on day one—there is no doubt that the people buying up the tickets to sell on are helping them to get all the money in on day one and therefore helping their cash flow—and then complaining about the very same people they have sold the tickets to in the first place. They are creating the problem they are complaining about and I am afraid I have absolutely no sympathy with them. If they are serious about tackling this problem, the solutions are in their own hands: they should sell tickets in dribs and drabs so that people can go on the day and buy a ticket at face value. That would, at a stroke, make a massive difference to the secondary market.

There are lots of things that people sell that are at a premium. I have mentioned them in the past and I do not want to go through a long list again, but we have seen it with Christmas toys. People have a bun fight to try to get a particular toy at Christmas, buying up as many as they can. Five minutes later, the toys are on eBay at an inflated price. Are the Government going to start stopping people buying up any precious and valuable commodity that has a limited supply? Of course not; that would be nonsense. So why are tickets any different?