Stephen Pound
Main Page: Stephen Pound (Labour - Ealing North)(11 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Philip Davies
I am grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich makes a good point, however, in that the amendment, which would delete the clause on touting from the Canterbury Bill, raises the question: what is so special about Canterbury? If the House agrees to the amendment, we will remove the restrictions on touting from the Bill. It might well be that people want controls on touting in Canterbury because of its particular circumstances. We ought to listen to the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury during an earlier stage of the Bill. Notwithstanding the offer he eventually made, he made it clear, at that point, that the restriction on touting was an essential part of the Canterbury Bill. He said that Canterbury suffered from huge problems, with which I am not familiar, of people touting for business in certain—perhaps historic—parts of the city. Perhaps people felt that touting took something away from the city.
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that there are people in the House who speak Middle English as if it were their first tongue. We all know that the word “tout” comes from the Middle English word “tuten”, meaning “to look out for”, but may I warn him that in Northern Ireland the word has a very specific and very dangerous meaning? It will frequently be found written on gable ends. I appreciate that Northern Ireland is not Reading, and it is certainly not Canterbury, but it is a word we ought to be careful with.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend makes a good point but, interestingly, it is not made clear in the provision that that would be the case. Many tickets state that they are not to be resold, or that they are non-transferable. The promoter of an event could take the matter to court to test the contract, and the court could find against the person who had sold the ticket on, whether for a profit or not.
Philip Davies
I will in a moment.
The striking thing is that, to the best of my knowledge, no promoter of any event in this country has ever had the courage to test such a provision in court. I could be wrong, but I believe that that has been done in Australia, however, and that the Australian courts found against the promoter of the event. They found that it was unfair to attach the condition to the ticket that it should not be resold.
I suspect that we are now discussing the provision on touting because the promoters of events are not satisfied that the law of the land will help them in the way in which my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) suggests. If what he said were true, there would be no need for any of these provisions on touting. Clause 11 would be redundant, because an event promoter could simply take their grievance to the courts. However, if the courts are not going to help, as I understand is the case at the moment, clauses such as these need to be incorporated into Bills so that touting can be dealt with, not because the touts are selling tickets but because people do not like them and want them to be moved off the streets and given fixed penalty notices.
Philip Davies
Indeed he is.
Notwithstanding the question of an individual’s freedom to do what they want with a ticket that they have bought, it seems unacceptable to include the clause in the Bill, as it would provide for imposing a further penalty. Let us imagine that someone had bought a ticket to an event but could no longer attend it. They would lose their money because they could not get a refund, but if they tried to resell their ticket, they would also face being fined for so doing. They would lose out financially.
Stephen Pound
I do not know how they order these things in the city of Christopher Marlowe, but this matter has now been tested in cities that have premier league football teams. There is now a non-profit-making organisation called Seatwave that enables anyone who has a ticket for any English or Scottish premier league match to resell it through that organisation. The key point, however, is that the prohibition on the resale of tickets has been sustained in court. I do not know about the case in Australia, but in Fulham, that is the law.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I have given hon. Members a bit of leeway, but I am worried that we are now getting into retail matters that have absolutely nothing to do with the Bill, as we all know. I hope that we can now stick to the matters in hand, and have fewer interventions; otherwise, we are going to drift into areas where I do not need to be.