Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

This Government are not learning or explaining how this will work. Once again, they are on the side of big business, not the fan or the single family member who has to move on that ticket because his girlfriend is not his girlfriend any more.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 28A. The Bill usefully sets out that regulations in relation to ticket touting will be brought in for sporting events. But a number of organisations, including UK Music, are understandably asking the Government to completely fulfil their manifesto commitment. In this sense, I am coming to the issue from a similar place to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, although I disagree with his remedy. It is right that we should do this because we need to end exploitative ticket touting across all types of events. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and I have been on the same side on this for many years.

Like many on these Benches, I am delighted at the progress that has been made on ticket touting for sports events, but I am puzzled about the wait for legislation covering music and other events. What makes it more puzzling is that music and sports events often take place in the same venues. This week, my wife will go to listen to Harry Styles; a few weeks ago, I could have gone to the same Wembley venue to watch the cup final. So I am sure that the Minister will understand why there is a measure of disappointment, particularly among music fans, event organisers and performers, none of whom derive any benefit from the current situation.

According to YouGov research commissioned by O2, online ticket touts are costing UK music fans at least £145 million a year. For some time, UK Music has been calling for legislation that includes a resale price cap to prohibit someone from reselling a ticket for more than the original ticket value, service fee limits to ensure that price caps cannot be undermined by inflated fees or hidden charges placed on consumers, and volume limits to make it unlawful to buy more tickets for an event than one individual is permitted to buy on the primary market. Taken together, those measures would create transparency for ticket purchasers and create a more level playing field for consumers.

My amendment 28A would simply require the Secretary of State to review the ticket touting provisions in Clauses 5 and 6 within 12 months of the Act coming into force and report to Parliament on their effectiveness. This review would provide an important opportunity to assess whether similar protections should be extended to the music sector and music events. I am conscious that a draft Bill is to be published in this Session, but I am also conscious that these things have a habit of slipping and falling foul of other priorities. We have yet to see the terms of the wider legislation, so can we better understand why sport has come forward first, and what makes the challenges of policing this area different or more complex for music?

Music fans face many of the same challenges as sports fans: tickets being acquired in bulk and resold at inflated prices, and genuine fans being priced out of events. The draft Bill, announced in the King’s Speech, means that music fans will continue to face inflated resale prices and unfair ticketing practices while they wait for reform. If the ticket touting provisions prove effective in the sporting context, the review should urgently consider whether comparable measures should be applied to music events, ensuring greater fairness and consumer confidence in protections. I have tabled this amendment to try to achieve a speedier route to having equity across all sporting, cultural and music events, because those who support those events—music fans, sports fans, or whatever—deserve that equality of consideration.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, and to take part in this group. I am physically and actually right behind my noble friend Lord Moynihan on these issues: it is a good provision, but it is the wrong position. It offers a solution that is fine for those critically important but few events that it will cover, but, for the vast majority, it is a tantalisingly close yet elusive solution across the rest of sport, music, culture, et cetera.

“World in Motion”, 1990; “Football’s Coming Home”, Euro 96: music and sport have always been inextricably linked, yet the Bill has not only missed the opportunity to bind these together with effective ticket touting provisions, it has also unfortunately set out a solution for the very few—which, understandably, is extraordinarily frustrating for the many. The provision is also unfortunate because it is very analogue and does not seem to speak to ticketing, touting and abuse as they are today—never mind how they will be in five, 10, 15 or 20 years’ time, when thinking about an Olympic Games and Paralympic Games bid in the 2040s.

I will speak to Amendments 27, 89, and all the amendments in my name in this group. I will start with Amendment 89, which proposes an accessible ticketing duty on all these events. For this, I use “accessible” in the broadest sense of the word. This goes to discussions that we have had in earlier groups around ensuring that we get the right principles threaded into this legislation. When we were putting together the ticketing strategy for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, all the weight of history was on us: all the rules, structures and expectations of what had gone before at all the previous 29 Olympic Games. Of course, there was a lot of good and a lot to follow in that, but, equally, we were the first people to be delivering an Olympic Games and a Paralympic Games in London in 2012. We not only took that incredibly seriously but took it for what it was: a once-in-a-generation opportunity. So we should seek to test, stretch and develop those principles that have been set out in all the documentation and history from previous Games.

Ticketing was a clear example of this, and it is one that I brought out in my amendment. We wanted hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren to have the opportunity to come to the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games and not pay a penny for their tickets, but we were also fundamentally committed to the value of the Games, the sports and the event. So we had a key principle: no free tickets. That is completely the way to structure these things. You do not drive engagement, fans and greater inclusion by thinking that you just need to give away free tickets. The way to structure it is to have tickets available to schoolchildren, as was the case in London 2012.

My amendment is broader. It would make tickets available to local organisations, to disabled people and to other groups—the list is not exhaustive—and have the face-value price of those tickets paid out of a portion of the most expensive tickets for those events. It worked effectively and inclusively at London 2012, and those people who were paying for the highest-priced tickets were delighted that part of what they were paying for was to enable hundreds of thousands of young people to come and experience Olympic and Paralympic sport, often for the first time in their lives, and certainly for the first time in their lives at London 2012. Taking a principle developed there, it would make sense to thread an accessible ticketing duty into this Bill.

On the tickets themselves, as I say, this is currently an extraordinarily analogue Bill at a time when tickets have become extraordinarily complex, more enabling and potentially exclusive in digital token form on digital ledger technologies. We have the ability to do so much more with tickets. First, we can drive out fraud and touting through having the tickets in an immutable form. Secondly, we can attach whatever we choose to that ticket. Say that somebody has particular access needs, food allergies or whatever it might be—you can put that in as part of the digital token representation of their ticket. We can make the ticket so much more powerful, inclusive and connected to the event. It could potentially drive fan engagement: tokens, merch, exclusive benefits, interviews with the players or interviews with the competitors. Whatever you choose, that is all available with ticketing technology that exists today, yet the Bill is silent on this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her quite extensive, albeit rapid-fire response. Many of us will read it in greater detail and come back with any questions after we have had that opportunity. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, that, while we might have disagreed on my recommendation that we oppose Clause 5 becoming part of the Bill, he at least recognises that it is effectively a probing amendment. The reason I put it down in those terms was that there were many good amendments that were already tabled on this subject. I wanted to highlight a really important point: by simply placing it on the face of this Bill, given the Government’s commitments, we lacked consistency across the country.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

That is my point exactly, and that is why this is an important debate to have had this evening. I congratulate the noble Lord on his observations and comments.