Birmingham Commonwealth Games Bill [Lords]

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Lisa Cameron

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 9th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook) and to have listened to some excellent maiden speeches. I am pleased to take part in this debate, not least because I had an important statutory instrument Committee on coronavirus at 6 pm, so had to slip seamlessly out of and back into the Chamber. I am grateful for your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I welcome the fact that the 2022 Commonwealth games will be held in Birmingham. It is a brilliant opportunity for the country, especially the west midlands—which, I am sure hon. Members have noticed, I am not from. I wish to focus my remarks on part 3 of the Bill, specifically with regard to ticket touting. As the House will know, I have campaigned against abuses in the secondary ticketing market for over a decade, and it can rest assured that I will not stop until fans stop being ripped off. We have had some notable achievements, in the last 18 months especially, but we are not there yet. The Bill provides the Government with an opportunity to address some of the issues relating to the secondary ticketing market. The Minister outlined some of those in his opening speech and I will be excited to see the detail when it works its way through the House.

[Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)]

The hon. Member is making an excellent point about ticket touts. Does she agree that it is very important that people across the UK can attend the games, no matter their socioeconomic class or how much money they have in their pocket, and that the organisers take ticket pricing extremely seriously?

[Mrs Hodgson]

I totally agree, and I shall say more about that shortly. I know that the Minister and, in particular, my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State share our passion for fairness in this regard, and I hope that the Bill will be a strong instrument in sorting out some of the worst aspects of touting in the ticket marketplace.

Part 3 says that touting tickets for the games will be prohibited. Hear, hear: that is excellent news. It will help the organising committee to ensure that tickets are both accessible and affordable for genuine fans, and I welcome that aim. The ethos of the sporting industry is to give people who will not necessarily ever have attended a sporting event—people who are typically young, or from a low socioeconomic background—access to affordable tickets, so that they can attend events and engage with, and potentially take up, the sport involved. They may then become the grassroots that can keep a sport alive. It is outrageous that ticket touts, operating outside the law, can take that opportunity away from people who might need it and sell tickets, many times above their face value, for personal profit.

Ticket touting does not benefit the sport, the players, the organisers or the venue; it only benefits the tout. Tickets for the games will be rightly sought after and I am sure that we will all try to get hold of some, so how will the Government enforce the regulations? What support will Birmingham Trading Standards be given to enforce them, in the form of finance and resources, and will West Midlands Police be given additional funds to support Trading Standards? Given that much of the touting activity targeting the games will be online, will the National Trading Standards e-Crime Team receive additional funds to tackle online breaches of the legislation?

Birmingham Trading Standards does not have the expertise or, currently, the trained staff that are needed in this highly specialised area. A Minister in the other place, Baroness Barran, said:

“Enforcement officers already have a suite of investigatory powers available to them through schedule 5 to the Consumer Rights Act 2015”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 25 February 2020; Vol. 802, c. 200.]

However, enforcement officers do not have the funding and resources that they need to implement these powers, and the “deterrent” in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 does not work. I hope that the convictions, just two weeks ago, and the sentencing of two ticket touts in Leeds will deter ticket touts; but they, too, will know that enforcement agencies do not have the necessary resources to do anything about their illegal behaviour. There are simply too many touts for an under-resourced agency to deal with.

Touts have been able to get away with it scot free for far too long, and the Bill must ensure that that is a thing of the past. According to the Department’s press release about the Bill last year,

“buying tickets will be clear, simple and affordable.”

However, the Minister will be aware that Google has allowed Viagogo to have “paid-for ads” for most events at the top of its search engine. Will the Government ensure that Google does not take sponsored ads for games tickets from secondary sites such as those of Viagogo and StubHub? As the Minister knows, ads for Viagogo that appear at the top of Google searches give consumers the impression that this a trusted and verified website, but that could not be further from the truth. Will he please tell us who, if the ads do appear and tickets are found on the secondary ticket websites, will be responsible for reporting the existence of those tickets? The games organisers will have enough to do without having to search and check that there are no fraudulent tickets for sale online. What guidance and support will the organising committee be given to establish a mechanism to reassure those who buy tickets that they are buying them from official ticketing platforms for the games?

London 2012 showed that we can protect tickets for events. That worked really well, and the Commonwealth games, or any other ticketed event, should not be any different. As we saw in 2012, ticketing regulations must be supranational, and ticket touting must be made an offence anywhere in the world. People operating abroad or using servers that are abroad, and selling tickets to the games, must be subjected to these regulations if we are to protect consumers and the reputation of the games. It should not matter where a person is, or where the server that that person is using is: ticket touting must be an offence anywhere in the world.

The Government can and should protect consumers from the abuses of the secondary ticket market. The Commonwealth games need not have a special status; the Government can use the points that I have briefly made as a blueprint for other high-demand music, sporting and theatre events that attract visitors to the UK. I urge the Minister to look into this issue as a matter of urgency. The Government need to fund enforcement agencies properly, so that we can stamp out ticket abuse once and for all.