Lyn Brown
Main Page: Lyn Brown (Labour - West Ham)Department Debates - View all Lyn Brown's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(11 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mrs Hodgson
I agree. There is obviously the unfairness, but there is also the fact that there was supposed to be legislation to protect football audiences from unscrupulous fans. Nothing stops any of those fans who might be able to get hold of that amount of money going along and ruining an amazing occasion such as the last match that Sir Alex will be in charge of. I certainly do not have any confidence in the websites that are now authorised by the clubs to sell tickets, because their ultimate aim is to make profits and I do not think that they are best placed to uphold the principles with regard to hooligans and segregation.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
What did my hon. Friend think of the Olympic ticketing system? That seemed to work quite well.
Mrs Hodgson
As my hon. Friend knows, we introduced legislation to protect the Olympic tickets. It was a proviso of the International Olympic Committee that the country that hosted the Olympics must protect the tickets, and it worked very well. Although the tickets were really hard to get hold of, the allocation was made fairly and they did not go to the highest bidder. Later I shall mention Operation Podium, the Met unit set up to police that legislation.
Despite the clear evidence in the “Dispatches” programme, and in a number of Penman and Sommerlad columns in the Daily Mirror since then, the sports Minister, the Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the right hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Hugh Robertson), has remained steadfast in his opposition to such a move. So I am now looking to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills to look more favourably upon such measures in his forthcoming consumer rights Bill. The sports Minister has, however, always been at pains when we have debated this issue to say that his mind could be changed. Indeed, in a Westminster Hall debate on secondary ticketing secured by the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley), who also campaigns on the issue and who supported my private Member’s Bill—he was the only Conservative Member who did—the Minister said:
“Purely in my own opinion, the moment that the security services or the police say the activity is becoming a proxy for large-scale criminal activity, and that large amounts of money are being laundered through the system, the case for legislation will become much easier to make.”—[Official Report, 13 March 2012; Vol. 542, c. 65WH.]
Well, now the police have that evidence. Operation Podium, which Members may be aware was the Metropolitan police’s dedicated response to the serious and organised crime affecting the economy of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012, in a report entitled, “Ticket Crime: Problem Profile”, published in February to coincide with the unit’s abolition, set out the extent to which fans are being “ripped off” through dodgy practices. It also laid bare the involvement of organised criminal networks, which will always be involved where there are large sums of money to be made in a semi-legitimate way. As for large sums, the Met estimates that the “industry”, if we may call it that, is worth £1 billion a year—a not insubstantial sum of money.
Mrs Hodgson
That is exactly the point, and it is well made.
For the benefit of the House, I shall quote some highlights from Operation Podium’s report. It makes very interesting reading. It found that
“due to the surreptitious way that large numbers of ‘primary’ tickets are diverted straight onto the secondary ticket websites, members of the public have little choice but to try to source tickets on the secondary ticket market.”
It concluded that
“the lack of legislation outlawing the unauthorised resale of tickets and the absence of regulation of the primary and secondary ticketing market encourages unscrupulous practices, a lack of transparency and fraud.”
This is the Metropolitan police recommendation:
“Consideration must be given to introducing legislation to govern the unauthorised sale of event tickets. The lack of legislation in this area enables fraud and places the public at risk of economic crime.”
They went further still by saying:
“The primary and secondary ticket market require regulation to ensure transparency, allowing consumers to understand who they are buying from and affording them better protection from ticket crime.”
In short, the report sets out how this market is failing, and how it works in the interests of a handful of professional touts, middlemen and the criminal underworld, with dubious practices and tax arrangements. As an example, in the wake of the “Dispatches” documentary, it emerged that viagogo had transferred its formal head office for legal and tax purposes from the UK to Switzerland, despite the fact that all its staff are still working right here in London. One must ask why.
The Government could take action in the Bill to make the secondary market work in the interests of the consumer, which is to say the genuine fans and event-goers who want to enjoy and patronise the arts. In doing so they would also make the market work in the interests of those who are investing time, energy and resources, as well as talent, of course, who at present have to make the invidious choice between being leeched off by touts or getting into bed with them to get a little piece of the poacher’s pie.
This pie, as I said, is estimated by the Met to be worth in excess of £1 billion a year. No wonder there is such interest from the criminal world. We are talking about huge amounts of money to be made from doing very little. But this is not a victimless abuse. I get e-mails from dozens of victims every week. They are law-abiding regular citizens, adults and children, who have found themselves drawn into this murky world because they just want to see their idol play a gig or go to the theatre or an art exhibition. They end up feeling that they have no choice but to buy their tickets from the secondary market because that is the only place where the tickets are. Some realise that they are being fleeced and some do not, but all feel they have no choice.
These tickets end up changing hands for four, five or even more times their face value, as we heard—sometimes thousands of pounds. Who gets all that profit? The tout does, mainly, but as I mentioned, the situation is now much more complicated, as the Met made very clear in its excellent Operation Podium report.
Leaving aside the criminality, murkiness and lack of transparency, I am doing this for the fans—for the millions of music, sport, art, comedy and theatre fans out there who are routinely priced out of this wild west of a marketplace. It is not fair. I read all the e-mails I get. Some are heartbreaking, especially those from children. These are tickets to an experience, sometimes a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This cannot and should not be compared to the usual rules regarding supply and demand. As someone once said about football, “It’s not a matter of life and death; it’s more important than that.” I really believe it is. Other countries have chosen to regulate the market, most recently France under Sarkozy, who is hardly a left-winger. It did so because that is the right thing to do and we should do it as soon as possible.
The Bill is fundamentally a consumer protection Bill, so let us take the opportunity to protect live event consumers. Let us bring some transparency to a very murky market. Let us give those whose talent and investment create this demand in the first place greater control over the supply of their tickets. But most importantly, let us put fans first and let us take action on ticket touts now.
Julie Hilling
Absolutely; I am well aware of that. In fact, we said that we would halve the deficit over this four-year period. The Government said that they were going to cut it completely in one term, but they are not even three quarters of the way there yet. They told my local council that it would have to find £20 million-worth of cuts over the course of the Parliament. It has already had to find £100 million-worth of cuts. That is the difference between a planned deficit reduction and planned action for growth and a Government who sit there saying, “If we cut, something miraculous will happen to grow our economy.”
Julie Hilling
That is the million dollar question. I have no idea why the Government will not take responsibility. They like to trot out the same old line that it is all the Labour party’s fault, but they must start to take responsibility.
We can all see the cost of the Government’s policies for the poorest in our communities, who are being hit not only in their pockets but by cuts in the services they depend on. We can see the consequences of cuts to in-work benefits, no pay rises, and rising inflation for those who used to feel comfortably off. We all know that there are only two ways to balance a budget: cut expenditure or increase income.
The Government’s cuts are harming not only individuals and their communities but the economy. A recent Financial Times study showed that cuts in social security payments would take £19 billion out of the economy. However, it is not just about social security spending. The low-paid spend more of their income, so less money in the community means more jobs lost, which means more people on benefits, and more jobs lost again—a downward spiral. The only way to reverse that spiral is to grow the economy by investing in properly paid jobs so that people are not dependent on social security but are instead paying into the coffers.
The Government do not have any real answers to the problems that we face. Unemployment in my constituency is up. One in 10 people in Greater Manchester skips meals so that family members can eat. Nationally, homelessness and rough sleeping are up by a third, and Shelter says that every 15 minutes another family is made homeless. The economy may be flatlining, but people’s incomes and spending are not. The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that in 2015 people will be worse off than they were in 2010. Wages are £1,700 lower than in May 2010.
Behind those figures are real people having a desperately hard time—people who are losing their homes, having to choose between heating and eating, and relying on food banks to feed themselves and their children. The people of Bolton West are struggling, and many are more than struggling—they are finding it hard to survive day to day. The Government blame them and are hell-bent on making the situation worse. They say that they have to cut the welfare budget but neglect to say that the majority of that budget is made up of pensions and in-work benefits. That does not fit the picture they are trying to portray of the skivers who are ruining the economy. They forget to say that jobseeker’s allowance accounts for less than 5% of the budget and that cutting benefit not only forces people to food banks but harms the economy. They forget to tell us that the private rented sector is far more costly than social housing. They will do nothing to introduce fair rents and nothing to curb the cost of private rented accommodation; they simply cap benefits in the hope that that might just bring down the rents. They introduce a bedroom tax that drives people to desperation.
The Government refuse to acknowledge that the work capability assessments that are conducted on ill and disabled people are fundamentally flawed. Even people who are too ill to leave their homes are being found fit for work. People who have lost their jobs through illness or disability are being told that they should get a job, but jobcentres will not sign them on for jobseeker’s allowance because they are too ill to work. Even though our staff are dealing with suicidal constituents on a daily basis, the Government accuse us of blowing the situation out of proportion.