Live Events Ticketing: Resale and Pricing Practices

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome today’s announcement and congratulate Chris Bryant on piloting the consultation legislation through Parliament. I declare an interest: I have worked passionately on this for 15 years with Sharon Hodgson, the excellent Labour MP, as co-chair of the APPG, and ending up as her frenemy on Times Radio couple of weeks ago— such is the way we work together. I totally share the commitment by the Government to better protect genuine fans through legislation, and I support them.

I have a few quick questions, but first I will say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that I do not believe that the Paris Olympics was a fair comparison. We did ban secondary ticket sales in the London Olympics 2012 and we managed through other measures to completely fill it. It was a phenomenal success, both at the Olympic and Paralympic Games, in demand for seats. It was done with very strict regulation—legal requirements—not to allow the secondary market, which was criminalised for the tickets.

The only seating that was a problem in Paris—and it was: I was there—was for the athletes. It is very difficult to determine how many seats should be left for athletes. They train, they go home, they do not necessarily decide whether they are going to be there, and that does lead to seats being left. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the secondary ticketing market.

I have three quick questions. Seeing how many excellent consultation exercises have landed in the long grass over the past 15 years—being hijacked, frankly, by modern-day ticket touts using bots, who have been very effective and put a lot of money behind their efforts—can the Minister promise primary legislation as soon as possible after this? I hope it will be in this Parliament, I hope it will be before I leave this House and I intend while I am here to work exceptionally hard to see that it is on the face of the legislation.

My number two question is: will attention be given to more details of the cap than have already been given today? Should it be face-value only? That, for example, is what the Principality Stadium does for Welsh rugby union matches. Or should it be a fee plus 10% to 13% for, say, administrative costs? That is the kind of range we should be consulting on. I would like to ask the Minister whether she agrees.

Finally, many modern-day ticket touts unfortunately move abroad—they are multi-billion pound organisations that are based overseas—and legislation has to be supranational in this context. We have to think about that very carefully in this consultation period.

Any crackdown on the black market has to be fully enforced. It is the terms and conditions that are abused time and again. That is illegal but, unlike in the current situation where prosecutions are few and far between, we cannot go through this consultation exercise without significantly reflecting on the fact that we have a prosecution service that can tackle this problem. We are talking about the future of true fans, many of whom travel the length and breadth of this country with their families, only to find that someone has swept the market with bots and printed forged tickets in order to satisfy the relationship with the secondary market, such as viagogo and Seatwave. They have to go home deeply unhappy, with little recourse in respect of their tickets, having travelled across the country to go to an event in their diary that was most important to them and their family.

This is the time for action, and I am delighted that the Government have come forward with measures along these lines.