Consumer Affairs

Steve Darling Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I congratulate the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on securing this important debate. What we have heard from hon. Members has been extremely wide-ranging. I will focus the vast majority of my speech on ticket touting and scalping. However, I want to reflect on what we have heard from hon. Members on shrinkflation and on how important it is to allow the public to understand the true price of goods. I look forward to hearing from the Minister on that, and also on the challenge of the Tesco Metro in the town centre having significantly higher prices than the out-of-town supermarkets. That is a significant issue in my constituency of Torbay. It is perverse that those who are poorest have to pay more because they are least able to jump in a car, and very often do not own a car, so have little choice but to use the Tesco Metro, or a similar shop, in the town centre. I would like some reflections from the Minister on that.

We also heard about e-bikes. It would be welcome to hear the Minister talk about regulations around e-bikes. The problem is not just e-bikes catching fire but the irresponsible ownership of them, and the fact that there is no age limit on their ownership. I spoke to a police officer earlier this week, and that was one of the challenges she faced. In addition, often those using e-bikes are up to no good, so greater regulation around e-bikes and some words from the Minister would be extremely welcome.

I will move on to the main meat of my speech. Concerts are an extremely enriching part of our lives. In my youth, I may have gone to a Deep Purple or AC/DC concert, but my guilty pleasure was going to “Abba Voyage” not that long ago. This is my only pun: we are seeing dirty deeds done not so dirt cheap to our consumers. Surge pricing and hidden costs are absolutely shameful.

Concerts are a way of driving tourism. I would not have gone to Leipzig a couple of years ago had it not been one of the few venues that I could easily get to to see one of my favourite bands, Goran Bregović and his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra. In my constituency of Torbay we have Electric Bay, an outstanding festival that was headlined by Fatboy Slim this summer on the Saturday night. Taxi drivers and those in the hospitality industry told me that the bay was buzzing, and that it was better than a bank holiday weekend. However, there are opportunities for ticket touts to come into play for these types of festivals.

One of my staff was impacted by ticket touting on Ticketmaster for the Oasis concert—there is no accounting for taste—which the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington mentioned. He spent hours online and saw the ticket go from £135 to more than £300—the surge pricing that we believe is wicked. On the secondary market, we saw that same ticket go up to £6,000. It is utterly shameful. I am aware that Ticketmaster sometimes labels tickets as if they are platinum when they are actually the same as standard tickets. Regulation is needed in these areas. To stop this, we need to take some inspiration from Ireland, where there are limits of 10% increases and surge pricing is banned in both primary and secondary markets. We need to allow true fans to sell on the tickets they are no longer able to take advantage of, but limit the additional handling fees to a reasonable level and ban surging.

Concerts are an outstanding way of enhancing one’s sense of wellbeing, relaxing and, probably most importantly, developing a sense of community. However, we need to ensure that people are protected when buying tickets, because we all need a bit of light relief in the challenging world that we all live in now.