Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Bill

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Stephen Pound

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 23rd February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Hodgson]

That would be great. Even the most technophobe of us should be able to manage doing that if it takes only two minutes, and maybe there could be one of those clever apps to make it even easier for all the young people to do this.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I have no knowledge of apps, but I do have my donor card here, held proudly in my hand, which I got by telephoning. When I introduced my Bill on this subject many years ago, I was accused, as were the supporters—including Dr Evan Harris, who brought in the Bill with me—of being Aztecs. Does my hon. Friend agree that the tide is now flowing in our favour and this is a piece of legislation whose need has been proven, but whose time is now?

[Mrs Hodgson]

Yes, very good, and I must apologise for not commending my hon. Friend for his Bill when I listed the people who had done work on this over the years. That makes us realise how many people have been pushing for this, and if my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West is successful today, his great achievement will be following in many other Members’ footsteps.

Whether it is clever people with their apps or people carrying the old-fashioned donor card, we in the Opposition and nearly all of us, or perhaps all of us unanimously, across the House this morning are in favour of a change to the organ donation law, to ensure that everybody whose life could be saved by organ transplant can have the gift of life. I therefore urge the Minister today to take the necessary steps to increase the number of people on the organ donor register, and I am sure this Bill will be a great asset in helping her to achieve that goal.

Jobs and Business

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Stephen Pound

Friday 10th May 2013 Commons Chamber

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

The hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) has sat down a little earlier than I thought he would—and I was enjoying his speech so much!

My constituents were looking forward to Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech, as they have looked forward to every Budget and autumn statement since this coalition assumed office. They have been looking for a sign that Ministers had abandoned government by dogma and were prepared to prioritise targeted programmes to tackle the problems of unemployment and under-employment, particularly among young people, but there has been no such sign.

Youth unemployment in my constituency is currently 14.3% as against a national average of 7.2%. That is totally unacceptable. It is double the national average and will be blighting the lives of those young people, possible irrevocably. Why is it always the north-east that suffers when there is a Tory in the Prime Minister’s office? Do not our kids deserve as fair a chance as the kids in the shire counties? Are they always going to be at the bottom of the list of priorities for Tory and for Lib Dem Ministers, perhaps because their parents vote for Labour in droves? One nation Labour will not behave in such a way when we are in office. We will govern for the whole of the country and all young people regardless of how their parents vote.

My constituents have been looking for signs that this Government are on their side, rather than on the side of the super-rich, and for signs that they are going to tackle the big issues which have such a big impact on the quality of life of so many people—lack of affordable housing, rising fuel bills, poor economic performance, zero growth and a weak jobs market. They will have been sorely disappointed as there were no measures to tackle any of them, and there was nothing to arrest the increase in child poverty. Earlier this week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies projected that there would be more than 1 million extra children in poverty, wiping out the progress made by the last Labour Government, and surely saddling the country with huge costs over the lifetime of those children in lost opportunities and increased health and earnings inequality.

There were some important items of legislation in the Queen’s Speech, of course, but in the main my constituents got a list of vague ideas designed by Lynton Crosby to try to woo right-wing voters back into the Conservative fold—I include some Government Back Benchers in that group. There was very little positivity for the future, very little vision for a fairer and more modern Britain and very little to put food on the tables in Washington and Sunderland West.

Having said all that, I am hopeful about one Bill. The consumer rights Bill announced in Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech has, of course, been long anticipated; indeed, time is running out for it to be introduced. As Members will be aware, the European directive on which it is based needs to be implemented by December, so the Government will no doubt be in a rush to make significant progress on the Bill before the House rises for the summer.

During that rush, I hope to make my case for the Bill to include measures to reform the secondary ticketing market to ensure that fans get a fair deal. I was very encouraged to hear the shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), confirm in response to my intervention during his opening remarks that, if the Bill introduced by the Government contains no such measures, he will seek to make amendments to ensure that the wild west that the secondary ticketing market has become is reined in and regulated.

Members, and certainly Ministers from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, will remember that I introduced a private Member’s Bill in the first Session of this Parliament that attempted to start this process. It would have established a scheme whereby those who are putting on a ticketed event—whether that is a gig, a west end show or even an art exhibition—could, if they wanted, protect those tickets from being resold by unauthorised individuals or companies for a mark-up of more than 10%. People would still be able to resell their tickets if they could no longer attend an event, but not for a huge profit.

Members might have noticed that I said, “even an art exhibition”. There is actually a roaring trade for such tickets. The Da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery hit the headlines last summer because tickets were being snapped up by touts, much to the annoyance of the National Gallery, which felt absolutely powerless to do anything to prevent it. Anyone who wants to see the exhibition on David Bowie that is on at the Victoria and Albert museum will find themselves having to fork out at least £60 for a weekend ticket, which is more than four times the face value.

Back in 2010, I thought that my Bill was a sensible way to empower artists and event-holders to protect their fans from the rampant profiteering that we see on a regular basis. I believe that even more now. However, I also believe that the market needs to be much more transparent, as consumers should know who they are buying from and the provenance of the ticket. That is how any market should work.

There are a number of reasons why I am more convinced than ever that we need action. Since my Bill was talked out by the usual suspects on the Government Benches, we have had an excellent exposé by the “Dispatches” programme of how websites such as viagogo and Seatwave, through which the vast majority of secondary tickets are now sold, operate. Surprisingly enough, that differed greatly from the image that they used to portray of themselves as being fan-to-fan exchanges. They used to have that description on their websites, but since they have been exposed they have taken that down. We saw tickets being sold as if by fans when those companies were receiving allocations of tickets directly from promoters, or using banks of phones and batteries of credit cards registered to multiple addresses. We also saw how those companies court what we call “power sellers”—professional touts who manage to secure huge inventories of tickets to events by highly dubious means such as botnets, which Chris Stewart of Ticket Hut was recently found by the Daily Mirror to be using to secure vast swathes of One Direction tickets. I am sure that there are a number of One Direction fans in the Chamber today.

What makes me more concerned about the murkiness of this industry is that football tickets are now being sold through those websites, with clubs exploiting their right to authorise resale by saying that the likes of viagogo and StubHub can do that, even though it is actually random season ticket holders who are doing so. The resale of football tickets through other channels is understandably banned, due to safety concerns, and many people might think that the resale of football tickets is illegal, because there is supposed to be legislation. The purpose of the ban is to ensure that hooligans cannot get their hands on any tickets, and that fans of each team are segregated.

[Stephen Pound]

Every word I hear from my hon. Friend makes me all the more furious that her excellent Bill was talked out. Is she aware, as many of us are in the House, that Sir Alex Ferguson’s last match in charge of a certain team from up north is already attracting ticket prices of £3,000? Surely, under those circumstances, action must be taken.

[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.