Breaching of Limits on Ticket Sales Regulations 2018

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Lords Chamber

Once again, I am grateful to my noble friend. I am keen to hear more about the important role of National Trading Standards, whether it has a significant ongoing role and whether any action can be taken against the abuse—which should more accurately be called “a bot”—abroad.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, who has such a distinguished record in combating this terrible problem of ticket fraud and the exploitation of consumers. I also have one two questions for the Minister, which follow on from what the noble Lord has said.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, referred to the company viagogo. Has anything come of the warning by the Consumer Minister, Margot James, who advised anyone planning to buy tickets on resale websites, “Don’t choose Viagogo—they are the worst”? The Advertising Standards Authority has referred viagogo to National Trading Standards, citing a series of transgressions breaching the UK’s advertising code. Where has that inquiry got to and can the activities of viagogo in the United Kingdom be curbed, if not closed down altogether?

What steps have been taken to ensure that the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 provisions, which make it an offence to resell football tickets in Britain at more than list price, are being observed? What prosecutions have followed of people who have breached those provisions—not only viagogo but other companies using bots and touts in the way described by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan? Noble Lords with long memories will recall that that legislation was brought in not as a consumer protection measure but as a public safety and anti-hooliganism measure to solve the problem of fans of rival groups mixing together in a hostile manner in football grounds. One of the ways in which that could have been curbed was by ensuring that tickets were not being sold to anyone through undesirable sites such as viagogo and others.

Those are my only questions. I welcome the regulations and I hope they achieve the result the Minister has set out for them.

[The Earl of Glasgow (LD)]

My Lords, it is very important that the draft regulations laid before the House on 26 April should now be approved, and therefore I enthusiastically support this Motion. Bots in particular must be abolished. They were a method by which digital touts, which is what I call them, could acquire tickets for sporting and cultural events for the secondary ticketing market and resell them at greatly inflated prices. My concern, though, is that these unprincipled secondary market touts are clever and cunning. They will continue to find ways of trying to circumvent these regulations. It is therefore important that the National Trading Standards authority or another body like that is given more powers to monitor the regulations and, when necessary, prosecute offenders.

However, bots and the secondary ticketing market are not the only reasons why West End theatre prices for popular shows have risen so steeply over the past 10 years. Of the 40 or so main West End theatres, more than three-quarters of them are owned by just four companies. It is the theatres, not the producers of the shows, that fix the ticket prices, arrange special deals, determine the publicity and control the ticket agents, of which in each case they will be one themselves. It seems that this small number of theatre companies, acting as a sort of unofficial cartel, are in a position to dominate the London theatre market. Does the Minister agree that there should be an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority, or again some similar organisation, into this very unsatisfactory situation?

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[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I have to be careful—I may not have been as careful as I should have been—to distinguish between the bots themselves and the ticketing platforms. Obviously, it is more difficult with regard to the bots, which are, in effect, ticket-purchasing software that could be anywhere, on any computer. I do not think I said that we were doing this. I am just highlighting the fact that following the money is important. I do know that payment providers such as Visa and PayPal do not want to deal with organisations or people who are committing an offence.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, asked about the effectiveness of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which creates an offence,

“for an unauthorised person to … sell a ticket for a designated football match”.

I am not an expert and I will have to follow this up but I think the problem is that that was enacted following the recommendation in Lord Justice Taylor’s final report on the Hillsborough stadium disaster. Lord Justice Taylor was specific that the offence be limited to football because of its unique public order risk. I am not sure it is right to try to address other issues through that. It was for public order reasons more than ticket resale and pricing reasons. But I am happy to look at that and get the noble Lord more detail from someone who understands the law on this.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

I am grateful for that answer. If the Minister is able to find out some more information, that would be very helpful. The point about the 1994 Act was to try to achieve proper segregation at football grounds for public order reasons. The difficulty was that if tickets were freely available from unauthorised sellers in the street—this was before the days of internet purchase—it would not be possible to segregate crowds. That is what Lord Justice Taylor was concerned about. But the fact that that offence exists still makes it illegal for companies which are engaged in the secondary market to sell football match tickets unless they have the express permission of the football authorities.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I understand and am grateful to the noble Lord for that. I absolutely agree that the offence was instituted for public safety reasons. But I will go into that in a bit more detail.

The noble Earl, Lord Glasgow, asked about theatre companies and tickets being concentrated in four companies. I have to plead the fact that this is not actually anything to do with this measure. Obviously, how those companies allocate tickets is a matter for them. As far as the Competition and Markets Authority is concerned, that is exactly its job—to look at competition—so the matter could be taken up with that authority.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, raised us to a higher plane, as always, when he asked what the definition of a ticket was. What is a ticket? I think that the nature of tickets has changed with technological developments. If this appears to be an issue when we review how the regulations are operating, we will consider how to address it. I should say at this stage that I said during the passage of the Bill that, once we had let the regulations bed in, we would look at how the technological developments were working and whether the regulations were sufficient. I said that we would consider that in the future when we saw how the regulations were working. As with many issues to do with the internet, I do not pretend that this will solve 100% of the problems with the resale of tickets, but the fact that we are creating an offence that stops multiple tickets being bought by machines to prevent fans getting a fair chance will solve a lot of problems. We will have to consider in future whether any other things need to be addressed—not least because of technological developments, which are moving fast.

I hope that I have covered most or all of the issues raised. With these regulations, alongside the ticket information requirements in the Consumer Rights Act and the enforcement work of the Competition and Markets Authority, National Trading Standards and the Advertising Standards Authority, we hope that the events industry will have the tools it needs to improve the opportunities for fans to buy tickets for events at a reasonable price and to protect them from being exploited. I ask that these draft regulations be approved.