Consumer Rights Bill

Debate between Jo Swinson and Mike Weatherley

Monday 9th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mike Weatherley]

I thank the shadow Minister for his intervention. The review must be balanced. Obviously, I am pushing for more regulation, because I feel that the free market has fallen down, but we should consider experiences around the world. There are states in America that have repealed secondary ticketing laws, and we need to look at why. Was it because the legislation was badly drafted? Norway and Denmark have laws under which tickets cannot be sold above face value, but they have never been enacted. Is that because, as someone mentioned, trading standards teams do not have enough teeth to implement such measures? All of that needs to be in the review; that is absolutely essential. There are so many aspects to the review that it will be quite an exciting one.

To summarise, and to misquote E.M. Forster on democracy, two cheers for the amendment, but not quite three. However, I am really pleased that we will enact this law before the end of this Parliament, and before I step down. This is very much a good step forward.

[Jo Swinson]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley) on their tireless work on this issue. They should be pleased with the outcome that they have managed to achieve. I want to address two points that came up in the debate. The first was the question, “Why now?”, and the second was about the CMA.

On the question of why now, my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) seemed to suggest that we had voted for something and will now be voting against it, or some such thing. The amendments that we are considering differ in two respects from the ones that we considered in January. First, on privacy, the amendments in January stipulated that the name of those selling tickets would have to be a piece of information that was made transparent. We thought that there were privacy concerns about that. Secondly, there were concerns about compliance with EU law—the technical standards directive—and that could unfortunately have rendered all the provisions unenforceable. That was because of the de facto price cap in the amendment put forward by the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West. For those reasons, although we understood the concerns brought forward, we could not accept the amendments in January. Of course, those concerns have now been addressed; that is why we are able to accept the Lords amendments today.

Last week’s announcement by the CMA has been mentioned. The CMA in no way sought to usurp the work done in this House. It had done a long-running piece of enforcement work against four sites. The announcement covered the transparency elements of amendment 12J, but the amendment puts things on a statutory footing and should be very welcome.

The CMA does, of course, have significant power. To address the concern raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, it would be able to stop an organiser cancelling tickets. The CMA has shown that it is willing to act in this market should there be any concern that tickets were being cancelled, and I am sure that it would be happy to do so in future. On the international point, as the provisions apply to marketplaces and sellers targeting the UK, enforcement action can take place elsewhere. Indeed, the CMA recently pursued successful enforcement action against several websites, including viagogo, which is of course based in Switzerland. That shows that we have the enforcement to back up these consumer protections, which are proportionate, and which do not give rise to the privacy concerns that we had before. They will help to make sure that the secondary market can genuinely thrive and work better for consumers.

Question put, That this House agrees with Lords amendment 12J.