Consumer Rights Bill

Lord Grade of Yarmouth Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a marvellous debate. I have heard so many wonderful, emotional things, and now I have to pull myself down and say, “Actually, fraud is already illegal in this country; we do not need any more law—we have enough of that”. We need what we have heard about today from my noble friends Lord Stoneham and Lord Younger of Leckie. The secondary and primary movers in this area need to improve access, and need to do what we need to do for consumers all the time.

What a consumer needs more than anything, first and foremost, is choice. Secondly, we need access to the choice—where do I get the ticket? Do I get it from a reputable source? Therefore we need a choice, access to it, and information about it, all of which has been described here today. I am talking about facts that we have known about for ever. Trading standards has already spoken; it stands for the same six rules for consumers. We want equity; we want it to be fair; and at the end of all that, we want redress. If it goes wrong—if there is cheating—we need that. If we push this underground by trying to tinker with the legislation we already have, then we will have no way of helping the poorest, the least informed or the most overexcited, who will not get their money back and will not get anything. It is stupid to even consider doing it: this is an emotional appeal. I can imagine that on sports tracks it all sounds wonderful, but if you want to get the job done right, the answer is to do it the other way: get the sports operators and the secondary markets right so that we can read about it and understand what we are doing so that no child turns up with a ticket that is a wrong ticket. We will not do it by trying to reinvent the law. We already have a law of fraud.

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as an occasional West End producer who tries to flog a few tickets here and there. The secondary market has been with us for many years. I well remember in my youth assisting in a Royal Variety performance and my job was to get the artists lined up on the stage to be greeted by Her Majesty after the performance. I stuck particularly close to the late and rather wonderful Tommy Cooper, who was somewhat uncontrollable; he was told very clearly—as all the artists were—not to speak to Her Majesty until the conversation was opened by her good self. Of course, however, as Her Majesty approached Mr Cooper, he jumped in and said, “Your Majesty, do you like football?”. Her Majesty replied, “Actually, not terribly, Mr Cooper”. He said, “Can I have your Cup Final ticket?”.

Whether this is an early example of the secondary market, I am not sure; but what is clear to me from listening to this debate is that the secondary market is alive and well and needs to be encouraged. The proponents of this amendment are seeking not to attack the secondary market, but to encourage it and legitimise it, and to help the sports bodies and promoters who create the events for which there is demand for tickets to manage them so that there is not £1.5 billion-worth of fraud. This is an attempt to attack tickets that do not exist; it is not an attempt to attack the secondary market. There is clearly a very serious problem here: people are being defrauded; the law is clearly deficient. If the Minister sets the Government’s face against this amendment, it is incumbent on them to acknowledge that there is a problem here and come forward with a solution of their own. This is easily the best solution that I have heard; it has the support of the people who create the events and have the interests of their consumers at heart. I sincerely hope that the Government—if they are unwilling to accept this amendment—will come forward with proposals of their own to deal with the £1.5 billion-worth of fraud that has been going on too long.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I echo the words of those noble Lords who have said that this has been a very good debate: it has indeed been good and it is right that it should have been, because it raised difficult issues with which the Government have been grappling. The predominant weight of the arguments that we have heard today—because they were not universally on one side—was for change, so I hope that that will weigh heavily with the Government when they come to consider what they are going to do.

I had a full speech here, full of witty aphorisms and wonderful evidence, but you always find that in debates of this nature, somebody stands up and says, “Do you know, just about everything that could be said about this thing has been said, but not by everybody,” and then they repeat them. I am not going to do that. The issue on which I want to reflect is what on earth the Government are going to do with this. When you have had your case as put in Grand Committee completely destroyed by the forensic words of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan; when you have had your best arguments bashed to boundary by the noble Baroness, Lady Heyhoe Flint; when you have reduced the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones—and it is an astonishing thing—to speak for less than three minutes in a debate; when your former Secretary of State is lining up to give you good advice about how you should deal with this, then you are in a spot of trouble.

You know you are in trouble when you have to rely on people on the other side who are basically scaremongering. I respect the noble Lords who have spoken in support of the Government on this matter, but I think they went way over the top, while we on this side were utter models of restraint. We insisted on only two things: that the equity that should exist for anybody who wishes to buy tickets is not abolishing, changing or adjusting any market; I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Grade, made that point very well, and it was previously made by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, who picked up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Heyhoe Flint. Instead, it is about making those markets that exist work fairly, removing the fraud where it is possible, and making sure that people can see and get access to the events they want. When you have consumers, event organisers, participants and the police—for goodness’ sake—on your side, what on earth are you doing, and who are you listening to when you stand against them?