London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 3rd October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness. She is an icon for disabled sportsmen and sportswomen everywhere and, more than anyone else, has introduced the Paralympics to the British people and made them popular. We are very lucky to have her in the House contributing to the debate.

I start by expressing my appreciation to the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal; to the Minister for Sport, Hugh Robertson MP; to the noble Lord, Lord Coe; and to their officials for convening the meeting on 13 September to discuss the Bill. I thank the noble Baroness for her subsequent letter of 26 September. I am happy to support the Bill, but I have a couple of concerns and some questions that I hope she will address when she replies, or subsequently in writing if she does not have the answers ready.

A number of my questions concern ticketing, which has been referred to already in the debate by a number of noble Lords. I have no problem with the provision in Clause 3 to quadruple the penalties for touting Olympic and Paralympic tickets. However, the issue of reselling and passing on tickets exercised a number of us at the meeting convened by the Minister last month. As a result of receiving her letter, I now understand the rules, although I was hazy about them beforehand. My noble friend Lord Stevenson referred to this, as did the noble Lord, Lord Addington. I am afraid that the interpretation of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is rather different from what I read into the letter that the Minister sent to me.

The letter states:

“LOCOG has confirmed that it is one of its requirements that the lead ticketholder (being the person who ordered the tickets) must attend and use one of their allocation of tickets. The others can be given to friends and family, as is the case with any major sporting event. However, if a lead ticketholder can no longer attend, they can submit their tickets for sale through LOCOG’s resale platform”.

I will ask, first, whether that “can” means “must”. The two words are different, and different interpretations may be put on them. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, raised the question of ID, which is covered in the subsequent paragraph. It is possible that there will be random checks on people as they go into Olympic venues and that they will need to show that they are the person to whom the tickets were originally allocated.

I share with the House a clear and coherent e-mail on the subject of ticketing that I received last week from a gentleman in Somerset. He wrote:

“The first round of ticket allocations were compromised … by the fact that people were allowed to apply for a maximum of 6 tickets; whilst we”—

he and his family—

“only went for 1 or 2 in the sessions we were interested in, the fact that 6 was set as the maximum is puzzling—one would have thought that a maximum of 4 per person was plenty and I am sure that this was instrumental in so many not receiving an allocation”.

He asks who decided that six was appropriate when the average family is nowhere near that size, and points out that some family members in the same house will have applied for the maximum allocation, compounding the oversubscription.

Perhaps the Minister will also say something about the random ballot. I am sure that she will have heard anecdotes about how some people who applied for a large number of tickets got everything they requested, while others who applied for far fewer received none at all. Was the random ballot based on the number who applied or on the number of tickets? If it was per person, and most of those selected went for the maximum of six tickets, it would have precluded many others who went for fewer tickets. Would it not have been fairer to allocate upwards from single tickets to two and then three, until all had been allocated? Would that not have ensured that many more people were successful in the ballot?

Perhaps I may ask also when reallocated tickets will become available. Will those who were unsuccessful in the first two rounds be given priority in this ballot? If that is the case, how will someone who has already been successful be stopped from attempting to re-register under a different name? What safeguards are in place to stop multiple applications? Can someone access tickets from two separate computers with the same registration details?

Finally, I am sorry if the Minister is getting tired of these questions on ticketing, but will she comment on the proliferation of commercial promotions where the prizes are Olympic tickets? For example, there is currently an offer at BP garages which makes 1,000 tickets available in return for petrol purchases. Would it not have been fairer if those companies had waited until after the final ticket allocations before running their own promotions?

That is all I want to ask about tickets. I have one other subject to raise with the Minister: the question of the integrity of betting on the Olympics. I am assured by Jenny Williams, the chief executive of the Gambling Commission, in a letter she wrote to me last week, that,

“the risks of betting and sports integrity issues to the London 2012 Games are likely to be minimal”.

I very much hope that she is right. I note that the DCMS is planning to list the IOC as an accredited organisation with which the Gambling Commission can share information, under the terms of the Gambling Act. I warmly welcome that, and I hope that the Minister will be able to say when these arrangements will be in place. Those of your Lordships with long memories may recall that I chaired an inquiry on the integrity of betting on sport in 2005 and our final report proposed exactly this sort of conclusion.

However, the Gambling Commission is very short of powers when it comes to overseas betting operators targeting British consumers. This issue goes well beyond betting on the Olympics, and the Government seem to have been rather slow in coming forward with plans to extend licensing to them. I note what the Gambling Minister, John Penrose, said in another place in July— that overseas operators will be subject to the same “standards and requirements” as those based in Britain, as well as being required to inform the Gambling Commission about,

“suspicious betting patterns to help fight illegal activity and corruption in sports betting”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/7/11; col. 38WS.]

However, my understanding is that these arrangements will not be in place in time for the Olympics. Can we at least have an assurance that they will be in place in time for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014?

I stress that I do not wish to appear negative. I think that the Olympics are going to be a fantastic success and I applaud the efforts of everybody who has worked so hard to create the venues and put together what I am sure is going to be a very successful set of Games. However, there are concerns about the issues that I have raised and I would be very grateful if the Minister could answer them.