Draft Breaching Of Limits On Ticket Sales Regulations 2018

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 General Committees

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure and privilege to serve under your chairmanship this evening, Mr Evans.

May I offer begrudging congratulations to the Minister on implementing yet another measure from the Labour manifesto, where we set out with a clarity that was perhaps lacking in the Conservative manifesto that we would implement anti-bot legislation to stop professional ticket touts ripping off thousands of fans in this country? The Minister did not put on the record her thanks to Professor Waterson, but let me put on the record our own thanks to him for his excellent review.

We shall not divide the Committee on the draft regulations, because the measure was such a clear and popular one in our manifesto, but we encourage the Minister to go a little further and to look at what else we promised in our manifesto. We said clearly that we would like to go beyond the recommendations that Professor Waterson proposed, which were good, but which we thought could be strengthened still further.

With that in mind, I shall ask the Minister a few questions. First, has she considered the recommendation by Professor Waterson that large-scale sellers on secondary platforms should be reclassified as traders? If someone is classified as a trader, a number of protections kick in under the Consumer Rights Act. At the moment, those protections are not available in the case of secondary platforms. It is therefore a very important question, and the Committee will want to hear the answer from the Minister.

Secondly, has the Minister considered Professor Waterson’s recommendation that such organisations should have to attain a licence to sell a large number of tickets? At the moment, they are making enormous profits from the Government’s rather hands-off, slipshod and laissez-faire approach. We think that that should change, and that Professor Waterson’s recommendation is important. We would like to hear the Minister’s conclusion, having considered the matter now that she has been in position for some time.

The third question is about the secondary ticketing market through companies such as Ticketbis and Viagogo, which continue to leave fans open to large-scale fraud. I understand that tickets for World cup and premier league games are on sale on Ticketbis without the relevant information required by the Consumer Rights Act. This will shock you, Mr Evans, but some tickets for the World cup final are coming in at more than £20,000. The Minister shakes her head, but she is the Minister, and I think the Committee would like to know what the Government are doing to ensure that fans are not being scammed.

[Ian Murray]

As a fan of Heart of Midlothian football club, I have never suffered from the inability to gain tickets to big matches, but there is a report today that some tickets for the champions league final on Saturday—Liverpool versus Real Madrid—with a face value of £61 are selling for nearly £15,000 on secondary ticket sites. Not only is that detrimental to fans who wish to purchase those tickets, but someone is making an awful lot of money.

[Liam Byrne]

I can scarcely believe what my hon. Friend has told the Committee. It is a very good example of the profit margins being made by unscrupulous traders, who are being allowed to get away scot-free by this careless Government.

My fourth question is about an important health and safety matter. As the Minister knows, at the moment secondary ticketing websites allow tickets in the away end of football stadiums to be acquired by home fans. That undermines safety regulations that have been in force in stadiums for decades. I did not hear what the Government propose to do about that. At the moment, the Premier League is describing organisations such as Ticketbis and other platforms as unauthorised sellers of tickets for games, yet they continue to operate with extraordinary impunity and in a way that completely flouts the protections that this House put in place in the Consumer Rights Act. We would like to hear what the Minister will do to bring order to this chaos.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James]

I thank hon. Members for their comments. I am sorry that I shook my head at the shadow Minister when he cited the price of World cup final tickets. Although I am the Minister responsible for ticketing, among many things, since I had not sought tickets for the final I really did not know that they were changing hands for that sort of money. I was shocked and surprised by that—perhaps I should not have been.

[Liam Byrne]

Is the Minister shocked and surprised enough to do anything about it?

[Margot James]

I can always rely on the shadow Minister to make some gibe or another, and that was quite a good one. We are doing a lot. As I tried to explain in my opening remarks, the regulations are important primarily in tackling the use of bots, but they should be seen in the context of other measures we are taking, including what the CMA and ASA are doing on the responsibility of secondary sites to include all the charges as soon as someone registers an interest in purchasing a ticket, rather than leaving that until right at the end. We are taking a panoply of measures, and we are not finished yet. I agree that we still have more work to do, but none the less this is an important milestone.

The hon. Member for Hyndburn asked about phone banks. The definition will fall to be decided by the courts in individual cases, but we do believe that the regulations could tackle the issue of phone selling as well, coming under the auspices of electronic means. The definition of an electronic communications network is a broad one.

On large-scale sellers being classified as traders or licensed, which Professor Waterson inquired into, the CMA announced in April that three of the four major secondary sites have committed to improving information, including on who is buying from whom so that people know whether a seller is a business so that they can benefit from asserting additional rights under consumer legislation.