My Lords, this Bill, as the name suggests, is supposed to be about protecting consumers—indeed, most of it does. However, this recently tabled amendment, which places new duties on ticket sellers in secondary markets, could actually allow consumers to be ripped off under the guise of protecting them. All the tickets which the sports and music bodies are concerned about will now go back to being sold in pubs, clubs and car parks, where no consumer protection exists, so this amendment could increase fraud by forcing customers to buy tickets on the street. It is no surprise that the amendment is completely out of step with public opinion.
I am sure that I can trade polling statistics with my noble friend. Polling by ComRes shows that 80% of the public support the right to resell tickets, 64% believe that they should be allowed to pay more than the face value of a ticket to get into a sold-out event, and 66% believe that event organisers should not be allowed to restrict what happens to a ticket once they have sold it. We could see thousands of fans criminalised if they do not provide the right information on their listings. The reality is that a seller will not provide the
right information if they think that their ticket could be cancelled. They could provide adjacent seat numbers, for instance, and other fans could then see their tickets cancelled, causing havoc at the event.
The treatment of the secondary market in ticketing is completely out of step with other online markets. Is there a need to declare where what you are selling comes from when you are selling goods on Amazon, for example? These proposed new clauses try to deal with an issue that does not exist. The wording of the amendment is clever in that it seems to provide a protection against ticket cancellation, but this protection is meaningless as it does not apply where there are terms and conditions which state that tickets will be cancelled if they are resold. The wording makes it clear that terms and conditions used to enforce cancellation should not be unfair terms under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations. This is because certain restrictions such as terms and conditions which allow resale at face value have been judged as not in breach of these regulations. This means that event organisers will be able to impose a de facto price cap on resale. Event organisers will be able to use the law to enforce their own commercial terms and conditions. We are about to give event organisers total control over tickets after they have been sold. This is a carefully constructed legal monopoly. Will my noble friend the Minister assure me that one of the subjects to be looked at in the review is how the number of people employed in the secondary ticket market has changed, and how the market share of the ticket issuers has changed?