London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, it may be convenient if I speak first to the amendment that has just been proposed by the noble Lord, which seeks to remove Section 31(1)(b) from the original Act. His amendment would leave the clause simply reading that the person commits an offence if he sells an Olympic ticket, "““in a public place or in the course of business””." That would create a dangerous situation, for the reasons that I mentioned in the previous debate, namely that unless we are successful—as my noble friend Lord Coe said a little while ago—in setting up a situation on site that enables people to dispose of tickets that they cannot use, it may be that perfectly reasonable people seeking to sell their ticket in any public place, not necessarily outside the stadium, would commit an offence. As I suggested earlier, instead of sub-paragraph (b), which the noble Lord has suggested we omit, we should say ““or above face value””. Turning to my main point, I do not presume to say that my amendment is in any way perfect, but I put it down originally because no one else had put down an amendment that would enable us to debate the issue that a number of noble Lords said at Second Reading gave them cause for concern. I will come to the specifics in a moment, but I regret to say that I agree with the noble Lord who has just spoken. The statement in the extremely helpful letter written by the noble Lord, Lord Coe, in his Olympics role, states that the, "““Terms and Conditions are standard practice at major events. They are NOT out of line with what the public would expect””." Certainly, a quick—even a slow—survey of your Lordships’ House asking, ““Do you expect the purchaser of the ticket will either have to be present or be available on the telephone to allow someone to use the ticket, which that individual has purchased on behalf of, let us say, his children?”” would show that this is not the general view. I do not believe this is what the public expect, because a large number of the public do not go to football matches and so are not familiar with what the practice might be there. One has to face the fact that the public do not expect this to be the situation, but it may be that they can be informed of it in appropriate ways having purchased the ticket. As I understand it, if that information is not actually going to appear on the ticket, it is proposed that a fairly lengthy document would be sent to the ticket-holder explaining these things. Certainly, it would need to say very clearly, in big letters in red type, that the ticket can be used by someone whom you bought it for only if you yourself are present. I leave to one side the question of what happens if the person who bought the ticket is dead—that will raise a difficult issue—but none the less it may be extremely difficult for the individual to be present or even to be on the telephone. I have put down an amendment whose effect would be to make the situation more flexible. The amendment states: "““To prevent ticket touting, tickets should record the name of the person purchasing the ticket—" I understand that it is proposed that that will be done— "““and indicate that ticket holders may be admitted even though they are not accompanied by the person purchasing the ticket””." The organisers may well feel that that drives a cart and horses through the whole thing, but they are not proposing to apply these provisions in a draconian way. On the contrary, they are proposing to adopt a flexible attitude. People need to be clear whether the person who bought the ticket has to be present when they wish to use the ticket on a particular occasion. We need to clarify whether we are going to stick to the thing rigorously or whether we are not going to stick to it rigorously but make it clear that ticket-holders ought to be able to establish that they are related to the person who purchased the ticket. As I said, my amendment is certainly not perfect and comes up with a solution that may be thought to be too favourable to ticket touts, but we need to clarify. We all recognise that there has been an enormous and extremely difficult exercise on ticketing. At the same time, we do not want to create a situation where, because of the provision stating that a ticket-holder must be accompanied by the purchaser, we have large queues of people trying to telephone the person who bought the ticket to say, ““Please will you confirm to the ticket office that I am related to you?””, or whatever it may be. That is a genuine problem, and I do not say that I have the answer yet. We need to give more thought to this.