Secondary Ticketing Market

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Chris Bryant

Thursday 24th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant]

I will not, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind, because I will try to answer all the questions. I will come on to his questions later.

One key matter that we will have to get right—if and when we bring forward legislation in this field—is enforcement, because there is no point bringing forward new lews if we cannot enforce them. We made manifesto commitments during the general election that we are absolutely determined to implement. As for when they will be implemented in legislation, we have had one King’s Speech; there will be another one coming along. I do not want to tell the Leader of the House precisely who will have what Bills at what time, because I might not stay in my post if I keep doing that, but if there is a Bill at some point, we will have to ensure that we sort out the enforcement issue. That is one element on which we will be consulting.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cramlington and Killingworth said that this issue is not at the top of the list of Government priorities. Whenever I post about it on X, people say, “Bryant, get on with doing the things that really matter to your constituents.” Well, this is one of those issues. The Government can do more than one thing at the same time. This is part of a panoply of measures that we need to implement to ensure that we put fans back at the heart of music, live events and sport. It is part of a wider Government strategy to rejig the economy so that it works for all of us. As my hon. Friend quoted:

“What is a club in any case?...It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging”.

It is fundamentally about the fans. They are the people who have created the value, and it is despicable that they are not able to benefit from it.

The hon. Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) made the point that things have got worse since 2012. I think she is right, which is why it was a bit cheeky of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans), to pretend that they had not been in government for 14 years, and to actually praise the previous Government for taking no action in this area. We are determined to take the necessary action, and I hope that the hon. Member for Chelmsford and her party will support those measures.

My hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson) used the word “parasite” at one point. On the “Today” programme, someone was saying that leeches have had great difficulty reproducing of late, but that they have discovered a new way. I do not want to overstate this metaphor, but we could argue that what we see in the secondary market is a form of leeching off the creative endeavours and the fan-led passion of so many others.

I will give some more examples. “Vampire” is my favourite of Olivia Rodrigo’s songs. We can get tickets for her concert in Manchester on 1 July next year on StubHub for £1,506, with a face value of £200. If we go to Viagogo, the price is £2,573 for exactly the same event—almost identical tickets, just a few rows in. That ticket’s face value, which we find only once we have gone two thirds of the way through the process with Viagogo, is £50. That is a shocking 5,146% increase. We can buy tickets for James Blunt—everybody knows I am not a great fan of his and he is no great fan of mine—that have a face value of £105 for £327 on StubHub.

It is not just about music: the England versus South Africa autumn international rugby tickets for 16 November, with a face value of £145, cost £889 on Viagogo. We should tell the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who I think is the world’s greatest Bruce Springsteen fan, that tickets with a face value of £150 are selling on Gigsberg for £1,044.08. Tickets for the world darts championship being held at Alexandra Palace on 30 December this year, with a face value of £55, are £248 on Gigsberg. I could go on, because this is an endless daily source of—frankly—racketeering based on a fundamental unfairness, and that is what we want to put right.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Jack Abbott) and I have talked about several issues in relation to the creative industries in his constituency. He made the point about Ed Sheeran, whom I think has made Framlingham castle more famous for him than for Queen Mary, which is quite an accomplishment after so many hundreds of years. That is also part of our tourism industry, as people want to go to Framlingham castle to see the place that “Castle on the Hill” was written about, so we need to capitalise on that. But we cannot if none of the money ends up going back into the creative industries or even into the local economy, and simply goes off into a black hole.

[Mrs Hodgson]

I do not want this debate to end without mentioning Ed Sheeran and how much he has done to try to tackle the scourge of ticket touting. Lots of other artists, such as Iron Maiden, Arctic Monkeys, Mumford & Sons and many others have tried, but Ed Sheeran went above and beyond by cancelling tickets when they had been resold. Taylor Swift never did that because she did not want to break the hearts of all her fans, but Ed Sheeran has been a real warrior in that regard.

[Chris Bryant]

Absolutely; that is a well-made point. Indeed, several other artists are moving in the same direction and I encourage more artists to go down that route. In the end, we need to get to a place where the face value is the face value and where other people are not racketeering on the back of that. Sometimes, the artist gets it in the neck because people think they have enabled it to happen, but that is profoundly unfair.

Incidentally, my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South also referred to Sam Fender. I am afraid that when Sam Fender was on at St James’s Park, I was watching P!nk at the Stadium of Light. Interestingly, having two massive gigs on at the same time had a dramatic effect on the local economy in the north-east, which is really important. There are issues for the whole visitor economy that need to be looked at, and I had an interesting conversation with all the local authorities and the new mayor, thinking about how we can make sure that the visitor economy works for everybody when such big events are going on at the same time. Part of that has to be about making sure that the money that is currently going out of the door and never ending up in the local economy does end up there.

My hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley)—she is a great friend and we have known each other a long time—spoke about going to see Cliff Richard. I once saw Cliff Richard live, but it was at a wedding and we did not have to pay. He did not sing “Congratulations”, which we thought was going to come along at any moment. My hon. Friend made a point about sudden changes in prices just as we get to the checkout. Of course, we would be absolutely furious if that happened in Sainsbury’s, Tesco or Morrisons. Why should we be any less furious when it happens on a website?

I was looking at tickets on StubHub earlier, when suddenly it said, “Your price is locked in.” Well, I thought that was the price. What do they mean when they say it is locked in? This is crazy; it is a deliberate attempt to make us stick and keep on buying the ticket, even when we have realised that we are buying something for 5,146% of its original face-value price, because that is the point at which we learn that that is the face value. This is completely wrong; it is not the market working in the interests of humanity, but humanity having to serve the market in an inappropriate way.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) made some really significant points. Many of us are making identical points, but that strengthens the argument that we need to take action in this space, and we are absolutely determined to do so. We will do it in a responsible way, and we want to make sure that every single element of the legislation that we eventually bring forward works, does what it says on the tin and is able to be enforced. That is why we will launch a consultation in the very near future, and I very much hope that many hon. Members will want to take part in the discussion about precisely how that consultation ends up being framed.

I think this debate is the second or third outing the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) and I have had against each other. One cannot just blame one’s partner for one’s musical choices. That is like the moment in Genesis when Adam says,

“The woman beguiled me and I did eat”

after eating the forbidden fruit. I am not sure that Jason Donovan is the forbidden fruit, but if the hon. Member likes Jason Donovan, he should just own up to it. It is fine; we will not think any the less of him for going to see Jason Donovan all the time.

The hon. Member basically read out the list of things from the last debate that I said we wanted to do, so I am delighted that he agrees with me or that we agree with him. When it comes to the legislation and the consultation process, I very much hope that he will want to feed in. If there are things that we need to amend, just to make sure that we have got them right, we will do that.

The hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth started off extremely badly, because he basically dissed Tom Jones, who is from Pontypridd—it’s not unusual, but I do not think it is very well advised. He asked a series of questions. He asked, “When?” I have already said that it will be soon. It will be in the autumn, and I reckon that the autumn is already upon us, so it will be soon or imminent—he can choose any word he likes, but it will be soon. Patience is a virtue.

The hon. Member asked whether the private Member’s Bill being advanced by one of my colleagues is a handout Bill. No, it is not a handout Bill; it is a Bill advanced by a private Member. He also asked whether there will be a cap on prices. We already said during the general election that that is our intended direction of travel. It is a moot point precisely what level that cap should be set at, because I do not want to completely ban people from selling tickets. If someone has bought four tickets but suddenly only two people can go, because somebody is ill or they have to change the dates, it is perfectly legitimate that they should be able to sell the tickets on. They might also want to be able to recoup not only the cost of the tickets themselves but some additional costs. That is one of the things we want to consult on, and what would be a suitable cap. I note the point that has been made about a level of 20%, which some people think is too high. Some people think that 10% would be too high; some people think that it would be too low. We need to make sure we get the level right. And of course we will analyse the situation in Ireland.

As we have all been announcing what gigs we have been to this year, let me say that, in addition to P!nk, who I have been to see three times now:

“What about us?

What about all the plans that ended in disaster?”

I went to see Depeche Mode in Cologne—the Germans just couldn’t get enough. And on Saturday night, I went to see Bronski Beat, on the 40th anniversary of the album “Age of Consent” coming out. That goes to the heart of why music can be so important: there must be hundreds of thousands of people in this country who remember when “Age of Consent” came out 40 years ago and how it completely transformed their understanding of themselves and who they could be in life. Being able to go to a live gig to celebrate that with lots of other people is completely transformative, and that is what I want to be available for as many people in this country as possible at a sensible, safe and sane price, rather than people being excluded because some people have much deeper pockets than others.

For me, to use a Welsh term—if it is okay with the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth for me to use a Welsh term and to refer to Welsh artists—this is about chwarae teg, or fair play. Fair play is all I am looking for in this market. First, we need transparency on price along the whole process. When a ticket comes up in the secondary market, people should be able to know what the face value of that ticket is from the beginning and what the deal is. Secondly, we need genuine equality at that 9 o’clock moment when everybody goes online to start bidding for tickets. The hoovering-up of tickets brings the word “hoover” into disrepute. It was striking that all the Coldplay tickets had gone in 40 minutes and yet, even before all of them had gone, tickets were being sold for £2,916 on the secondary market. That is clear evidence that something is awry with the way the system works.

Also, where there is an excessive increase in the secondary market, as we have referred to, that is just wholly inappropriate. It prices people out and, as many Members have said, it does not mean that any of the money goes back into the creative industries or the local economy, which is highly problematic.

I want openness in dynamic pricing. People should be able to understand from the very beginning if that is the process they are entering into. Originally, we were going to consult only on what precise measures we should bring forward in relation to the secondary market, but we are now looking at dynamic pricing. As several Members have said, there are versions of dynamic pricing that do work, and we do not want to ban those. I would argue that the early-bird tickets available for the Rhondda arts festival in my constituency—I suppose I should declare an interest—are a perfectly legitimate part of the whole equation. They sometimes bring money into venues early on, and we do not want to ban that.

We are not looking at dynamic pricing in the whole of the economy, but simply in relation to live events. Because that was not a manifesto commitment before the general election, we will be doing a call for evidence. If people have evidence of where the dynamic pricing model is not working and is counterproductive to the market, please get in touch.

I praise some of the action taken by some of the artists in the industry, which has been referred to. It looks like that is everything—no, there is one thing more I want to say.

Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Chris Bryant

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 21st May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Hodgson]

Because of the scale!

[Sir Chris Bryant]

The secondary ticket market is the spivs: it is precisely the same set of people scamming the system and the public. They are taking advantage of people’s desire to get tickets, and thereby making the market simply not work in the interests of the creators of the art, the fans, or the stadiums and venues themselves. That is why we want to take action.

Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Chris Bryant

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 30th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Hodgson]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I feel the fingernails.

[Mrs Hodgson]

I waited until my hon. Friend got to the end of all those disgraceful, abhorrent examples. Will he clarify for me a fallacy that the touts often put around about me and my hon. Friends—they will say the same about him? They say that we want to stop people being able to resell their tickets when they cannot go—they have bought them in good faith and genuinely cannot go. Will he clarify that that is not what any of us seeks to do? I of course want people to be able to resell their tickets, but at face value. Does he agree?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I completely agree, and that is Labour party policy. I am used to fallacies being written about me, and I have seen many written about my hon. Friend as well. I am sure we will all get over it. Incidentally, that is why, as I shall come on to say later, it is very important that we have a free press that is able to say what it wants, free from the intervention of state owners from other countries.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, it is perfectly legitimate for somebody who has bought a couple of tickets for Saturday night and who suddenly finds that they are ill, that they have to go to a family engagement or that they have bought tickets for the wrong night to be able to sell them on at face value, or perhaps for a little bit more simply to cover the cost of administration and things like that. However, this is a market that is not working. It is an example of market failure, not an example of market success.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Hodgson]

It absolutely is. It is not a level playing field at all. I was going to come to the bots, and the fact that nobody has yet been put behind bars for having used bots, even though they are illegal, and are the tool that touts use to harvest tickets, so that they can scam the rest of the population and all our constituents. I am happy to stand here and crowd-please—I will do it until my dying breath—because that is what we are here to do. We should do the right thing for the public, and they are calling for us to regulate this market.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I do not want my hon. Friend’s dying breath. Did she notice that the lovely Minister did not even present a single argument against any of the elements in the Lords amendment? He did not make the argument on why the Government do not support it, even though it is a patently obvious and sensible measure.

[Mrs Hodgson]

That is a good observation. To hazard a guess, the Minister probably agrees with the Lords amendment. He is a decent chap, and I think he sees the right in it, but he is sitting on the Government Benches. He is always welcome to come and join us on these Benches—it is quite a popular thing to do lately. If he wants to come over here, we will sort this out. It would be great if he was part of that, which is probably deep down what he would like to do.

All the websites that we are talking about are based outside the UK. They employ, essentially, no British staff—maybe a handful at most, but it is hard to check. They all masquerade as marketplaces where fans can buy and resell with other fans, but we know that is not true. All are dominated by large-scale online touts committing criminal offences to harvest tickets in bulk, as my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) said in his excellent intervention. That has led to a highly lucrative resale market worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

This is not small fry anymore. Face-value tickets are syphoned away from genuine fans and sold back to them at highly inflated prices. My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) said in her excellent speech that the number of touts has gone from hundreds to many, many thousands. It is getting out of proportion. This is best summed up by Chris Allison, the former deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police. Following a four-year investigation of touts post the Olympics—those tickets were protected in law, as I mentioned earlier—he stated:

“Touts are part of organised criminal networks often involved in other crimes”.

In recent years, enforcement bodies such as the CMA, National Trading Standards and the Advertising Standards Authority have tried, with varying degrees of success, to intervene in this broken market, either to prosecute the touts who are unlawfully defrauding music and sports lovers, or to force the ticket resale websites to comply with consumer protection legislation. And, oh my, the CMA has tried so hard to force those websites to comply, using the measures that it has to hand, which are not enough. It has even asked for further measures; as we heard in the last debate on this subject, the Government rejected that.

This has become an increasingly complex situation to sort out. That is why the Labour party is seeking to follow the examples of countries such as Ireland, France and Australia by capping the price at which tickets can be resold. Let me draw the House’s attention to my private Member’s Bill in 2011, which sought to do just that: cap resale at face value plus 10%, as the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant), said. That would allow someone reselling tickets to reclaim extra costs, such as booking fees.

Contrary to what has been written about me over many years, I do not want to stop any fans from reselling their tickets if they can no longer go to the event. I just want the industrial-scale, parasitic scalping to stop. However, until we get to that point—and while the Conservatives are still in government—it is important that current legislation is made as effective as possible. They could ensure that now. The small measures that we are talking about do not go as far as we plan to go, but they would be a start in preventing consumer harm and making it harder for bad actors to thrive.

I support Lords amendment 104, introduced by my friend and co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse Lord Moynihan, with the assistance of Lord Clement-Jones, Baroness Jones and others. We have Lord Moynihan to thank for the amendments to the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that got through small measures that we hoped would be the panacea for all the problems in the secondary market, but nine years later, that Act has not fixed this broken market. That is why we need this amendment.

In the amendment, proposed new section 92A(1) of the 2015 Act would compel touts to provide proof of purchase to the ticketing facility, or evidence of title to the tickets offered for resale. That is common sense, pragmatic and cost-free. The provision would target traders and businesses only, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South said, would eliminate the speculative selling that is endemic on platforms such as Viagogo, and the emotional devastation and physical risk that comes with it. I have seen numerous cases of what she spoke about: people being turned away, after having travelled from one end of the country to the other at great expense, and having booked overnight accommodation. They find that they cannot get into the theatre, the O2, the concert or whatever it may be, because they have invalid tickets.

Someone wrote to me recently who got in touch with Viagogo before the event because they feared that they had an invalid ticket. They were told to try their luck on the door, regardless of the fact that it was an invalid ticket. They knew that they would be turned away at the door with this Taylor Swift ticket, but were told, “Just try your luck. If you can’t get in, we’ll give you a refund.” They would have to fight for it first, and it would take six months if they were lucky. This person was also told, “Why not sell it on? List it again, and we won’t charge you a fee.” It is outrageous that she was supposed to pass it on. I have emails between her and Viagogo to back this up. She was being encouraged to sell on a ticket that she knew was invalid, causing more victims. Those are the sorts of practices that these websites use.

In August 2022, an ITV investigation based on data from FanFair Alliance found that two thirds of festival tickets on Viagogo were fraudulently listed by just three individuals. These resellers are relatively few in number but account for 90% to 95% of the tickets sold on platforms such as Viagogo. Let us think about that: just three major touts were selling 90% to 95% of festival tickets. Other platforms, such as Gigsberg, are 100% reliant on businesses and traders, many of whom my APPG and the CMA believe are acting illegally.

Subsection (2) of proposed new section 92A would crack down on the industrial harvesting of tickets by preventing resellers from selling more tickets to an event than they can legally purchase from the primary market. That is just common sense, surely. This was first recommended by the CMA in August 2021, almost three years ago. It made the proposal after a six-year enforcement investigation that concluded, as I said, that the CMA needed “stronger laws” to tackle illegal ticket resale. This change would make it easier for genuine fans to access tickets instead of professional touts looking to make a parasitical profit.

Despite the fact that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish said, using bots and other malicious software is illegal, touts do so without fear of prosecution, as no one has yet been prosecuted for using bots for the industrial harvesting of tickets. Artists such as Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift have repeatedly stated that they do not wish for their tickets to be touted. Artists get upset when their loyal fans blame them for not protecting them from touts, even though they do try. Both Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran have gone to great lengths to try to protect their fans from the touts.

Subsections (3) and (4) of proposed new section 92A force touts to clearly state the face value of any ticket listed for resale—again, surely that information should be provided—and to ensure

“the trader or business’s name and trading address are clearly visible, in full, on the first page the ticket is viewable on.”

The information

“must not be hidden behind an icon, a drop down menu or other device”,

which is what actually happens. The Consumer Rights Act states explicitly—these are Lord Moynihan’s reforms, which were added to the 2015 Act—that platforms must legally provide buyers with seat locations, face-value prices and restrictions, for example. They should be provided

“in a clear and comprehensible manner”

and

“before the buyer is bound by the contract for the sale of the ticket.”

Before they purchase, consumers have a right to know what they are buying, and who they are buying it from. That is in current law, but Viagogo has a track record of hiding face value behind what we call “hover text”, or small, tiny icons marked “FV”, so you have to know what you are looking for to find it. It obscures trader identities behind a tiny star icon, and only reveals a trader’s identity after the user enters their credit card details and has gone through the CAPTCHA process, so the user has often committed to buying before they know who they are buying from and what the face value is. That is in straight contravention of the 2015 Act.

On 99.9% of other websites, CAPTCHA is used to protect consumers. On Viagogo, it is used to protect the identity of its commercial suppliers—in other words, touts. Details of any ticket restrictions—for example, the information that resale is only allowed at face value—are provided in an unclear and incomprehensible manner, and are often buried in the middle of other small print, and then negated by claims about Viagogo’s “guarantee”—that is a very loose term if you are on Viagogo’s website.

Those practices are purposely misleading for most, but even more so for those who are visually impaired, tourists who do not speak fluent English, or older people without niche technical skills, who could be buying tickets for a grandchild’s birthday. I have had lots of grandparents in touch with me. As someone said—I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South—they then feel stupid. I have had such a number of emails from people saying, “This is my fault. I was stupid. I should have known better. I should have checked.” We should not allow companies to exist that do this in such a big way. They say, “Buyer beware”; that is Viagogo’s motto, I think. It is probably hidden on its website. What is happening is not right, and it is up to us to protect consumers; that is what Parliament is for. We should not allow this to happen on such a scale.

Furthermore, experts involved with the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse have found that large numbers of sellers are based abroad, or have links to forms of organised crime all the way up to convicted drug dealers, money launderers and bank robbers. The secondary ticketing market is not full of “classic entrepreneurs” as a former Chancellor and former Culture Secretary, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sir Sajid Javid), would have us believe. They are serious criminals. If Members want to see when he said that, it was in 2011 when he was helping to talk out my private Member’s Bill.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Chris Bryant

3rd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 29th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Hodgson]

I am last, but by no means least, I hope. We still have the Minister’s closing remarks to come, so I am not altogether last.

As colleagues will know—if they do not, I am going to tell them now—the Nissan plant is in my constituency of Washington and Sunderland West. [Interruption.] Yes, it is. Many will also know that the Nissan Leaf is manufactured there. If I know Nissan, I am confident that it will have been following this debate closely, and I have no doubt it will get in touch with my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) to discuss her Leaf experiences further. As she said, it is very important that consumers who make the leap to a Leaf—do you like what I did there?

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Is it all like this?

[Mrs Hodgson]

No, I am just trying to lighten the mood. It is very important that such consumers have a good experience if society is ever to make the transition to electric vehicles that we all hope to see.

I rise to raise briefly some points about three areas of part 2 of the Bill—clause 10, clause 9, and clauses 11 and 12—each of which I will address quickly. From speaking with Nissan, I know it is welcome that the Bill intends to impose requirements on large fuel retailers and service area operators “within a prescribed description” to provide public charging points. However, it is important, for all the reasons we have heard expressed so eloquently tonight, that this prescribed description is as ambitious as possible and is used in such a way as to deploy the electric vehicle charging infrastructure to its maximum potential. I therefore hope the Minister will elaborate further on how the Government plan to make sure that the expansion of this infrastructure is done in a sustainable, sensible and joined-up manner that does not hinder future growth.

Another aspect of ensuring that this important infrastructure works in the right way is ensuring that electric vehicle charging is open access and not restricted to members of charging schemes only or, as we have heard, to people with certain types of plugs. It is important as this infrastructure rolls out that it does not become a patchwork of varying payment methods, membership schemes and plug points, but instead is accessible to all to help encourage more people to make the move or the leap to electric vehicles. Will the Minister assure me that this will be considered as the Bill progresses to the other place?

The last point I want to touch on is smart charging as it is considered in the Bill. Smart charging is a new and exciting innovation and, as the Minister will be aware, Nissan has been pioneering work on vehicle-to-grid technology, where an electric vehicle’s battery can support the grid network at peak times when it is not charging. The Bill makes positive commitments in this area, but it would be welcome if the Minister committed throughout the Bill’s progress to ensuring that the continued development of these new technologies is supported.

Overall, this is a very welcome Bill that I know will have significant effects on Nissan in my constituency and on the wider electric vehicle industry. I hope that as the Bill progresses we will see further strengthening to make sure that, as we go into the future, electric vehicles become more and more accessible to drivers and, as we so desperately need to be doing right now, that this helps to reduce pollution. With those few remarks, I will end, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.