Breaching of Limits on Ticket Sales Regulations 2018

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Glasgow (LD)]

My Lords, it is very important that the draft regulations laid before the House on 26 April should now be approved, and therefore I enthusiastically support this Motion. Bots in particular must be abolished. They were a method by which digital touts, which is what I call them, could acquire tickets for sporting and cultural events for the secondary ticketing market and resell them at greatly inflated prices. My concern, though, is that these unprincipled secondary market touts are clever and cunning. They will continue to find ways of trying to circumvent these regulations. It is therefore important that the National Trading Standards authority or another body like that is given more powers to monitor the regulations and, when necessary, prosecute offenders.

However, bots and the secondary ticketing market are not the only reasons why West End theatre prices for popular shows have risen so steeply over the past 10 years. Of the 40 or so main West End theatres, more than three-quarters of them are owned by just four companies. It is the theatres, not the producers of the shows, that fix the ticket prices, arrange special deals, determine the publicity and control the ticket agents, of which in each case they will be one themselves. It seems that this small number of theatre companies, acting as a sort of unofficial cartel, are in a position to dominate the London theatre market. Does the Minister agree that there should be an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority, or again some similar organisation, into this very unsatisfactory situation?

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I join those who have welcomed this statutory instrument. We could say that progress on the part of the Government has been somewhat slower than perhaps we would have wished, but nevertheless we are surely getting there. That is largely due to the fact that we are working in a cross-party way and in a spirit of collegiate support on the issues that are worrying us in this area.

In your Lordships’ House, this effort is led by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, who is in his place and has spoken out. However, it would be right at this point to recognise the work of the all-party group which he talked about, because it has indeed been good at keeping up pressure on the Government on this issue. We also miss, yet again, the spirit and enthusiasm of Baroness Heyhoe Flint, who sadly is no longer with us but who was definitely part of the team that includes on our side my noble friends Lady Hayter and Lord Collins, who have managed to keep this issue in front of your Lordships’ House and have got us to where we are today.

Having said that, others have mentioned the problem of resourcing the teams which will have to make sure that the new regulatory process works in practice, and that means trading standards in particular. It is not, as others have said, just a question of resources; it is also a question of matching the technical skills of those who are operating computers to try to cheat ordinary customers out of the ability to buy tickets as they would wish. I am sure that the Minister will have some words to say about that, but I would be grateful if he could make sure that we understand better how the resourcing element of this is going to be met.

Finally, we are still left with a couple of rough ends, and I do not think that we should consider this to be the end of the game. I have yet to have properly established what is a ticket; the legal definition still eludes those who have been working on this issue. It can either be a licence to attend a performance or it can be a piece of real property which, with justification, can be sold on to others. I think that it is a bit of both, and it would be helpful if we could make sure that we put into statute a proper definition of what a ticket is. Once we have that, the rest of the issues which are raised by this whole question of touting and how it operates will be erased.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to add my voice to those who have spoken, some of whom have of course carried the burden of this subject for quite a long time. A few years ago, I wanted to see David Tennant performing in “Richard II” at the Barbican. Because of the activities of the organisation already named, I was obliged to pay hundreds of pounds for a ticket, greatly inflated from the face value, in order to get a rather poor seat. I have never told my wife about this expenditure and now that I have made my confession on the Floor of the House, I hope that she will not read Hansard. However, I have been a victim of touts and it was only the grandeur of the performance that rescued the whole thing in my mind.

It is of course scandalous that these things take place. It is perhaps unfortunate that trading standards people, who are accustomed to dealing with infractions of this nature and are empowered to do so, are given less than helpful advice when it comes to pursuing matters in this area. The police have all the powers necessary to bring cases and all the rest of it. It seems important that the police are not burdened with what, for them, will be a marginal or lesser activity. They face so many serious things these days. Perhaps we can look at that in due course.

Since I have mentioned drama and quoted Shakespeare, perhaps I can quote the words of the Minister back to him. He said in an earlier debate that,

“with the new offence on the statute book, the Government will work with industry to enforce it. An offence is only worth having if criminal acts are reported. We have industry groups in place that are now willing and able to take action in partnership with our law enforcement agencies”.—[Official Report, 29/3/17; col. 660.]

We are promised constant review of the outcomes of these regulations once we have approved them. Of course that is good, but are we convinced that if we wait a statutory amount of time—a year or two—to monitor what is happening, the police might not feel that this was their priority and we will have rather little to report at that time, and that we cannot anticipate already the likely shortcomings in the way this matter will be implemented?

My children are less concerned with David Tennant at the Barbican than they are with the Arctic Monkeys. Of course, their recent re-emergence to the public saw a prime example of this kind of difficulty. Indeed, it might well be described for all of us as our “Favourite Worst Nightmare”, since that was the name of one of their albums. One commentator at that time said that it is easier to buy a gun in the United States than an Arctic Monkeys ticket in the United Kingdom. Or, as another one said, it is,

“easier to get a reservation at Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino”,

than one of their tickets. That is another one of their albums, course.

It is well enough to play around with words; it is the ordinary public who suffer from these dangerous and profiteering pirateering activities. It is time that we recognise this as something that has to be addressed, which we do and have done. Indeed, looking at some briefing from Ticketmaster, I see for just how long it has been active in the field trying to control these sorts of activities. It is time that we find ourselves not only expressing concern and making provision, but giving power to the people best able to do something about this so that, when we get our promised report back in due course, we will be able to see first, to answer the Minister’s worries, people brought to justice and, secondly, treated righteously before the law.

All of us can express our very real concerns about this aspect of our national life. All of us want to see something done about it. We just hope that this statutory instrument will not only add something that looks right on paper, but achieve some of the objectives we mentioned today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I do not think they lack powers with regard to bots that are based in this country, but the noble Lord’s point, I believe, was that the actual ticket-purchasing software that is based abroad is in the same position. The offence applies to bots if the activity takes place. It is the enforcement that is more difficult. The offence applies as long as it is to buy tickets for events in the UK.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

The Minister mentioned earlier that the answer may lie in following the money, which has worked with regard to gambling and child protection. Does he think that this is now a real possibility in this area? Clearly, if these bots are operating from abroad and the instructions are from extraterritorial areas that we cannot reach, the right thing to do is to follow the money.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I have to be careful—I may not have been as careful as I should have been—to distinguish between the bots themselves and the ticketing platforms. Obviously, it is more difficult with regard to the bots, which are, in effect, ticket-purchasing software that could be anywhere, on any computer. I do not think I said that we were doing this. I am just highlighting the fact that following the money is important. I do know that payment providers such as Visa and PayPal do not want to deal with organisations or people who are committing an offence.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, asked about the effectiveness of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which creates an offence,

“for an unauthorised person to … sell a ticket for a designated football match”.

I am not an expert and I will have to follow this up but I think the problem is that that was enacted following the recommendation in Lord Justice Taylor’s final report on the Hillsborough stadium disaster. Lord Justice Taylor was specific that the offence be limited to football because of its unique public order risk. I am not sure it is right to try to address other issues through that. It was for public order reasons more than ticket resale and pricing reasons. But I am happy to look at that and get the noble Lord more detail from someone who understands the law on this.