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Ticket Touting

The hon. Gentleman is undoubtedly right. That is another valuable opportunity for sporting bodies to demonstrate that volunteers who act out of love for the game can gain some benefit. Equally, sports bodies often allocate blocks of tickets for particular clubs as a reward for their efforts. It is all the more regrettable, in their eyes at least, when clubs that receive tickets decide not to use them, but to sell them on the internet. To address the problem of the secondary market, as they see it, sporting bodies and concert promoters have tried to impose conditions on the sale of tickets—most tickets say ““not for resale”” on the back. Clearly, that has proved singularly ineffective in preventing the secondary market from operating, but there is also a question mark over its legality. There is a view that a situation in which no legitimate refund mechanism is available for people who purchase tickets and, for perfectly legitimate reasons, find themselves unable to use them, breaches of the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. There is a question mark against whether it is legal to attempt to ban the secondary market if people cannot obtain a refund through a mechanism that has been approved by the sporting body, for example. The Committee examined that and expressed disappointment that the precise state of the law had not been established and that there had not been a test case. The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme felt strongly that what the Office of Fair Trading did to establish a clear legal position regarding the status of the banks could have been done equally for the secondary market. I hope that there is now some possibility that we will soon achieve agreement between the OFT and the ticketing agencies on that point. We considered the possibility of instituting a blanket refund policy, but we fully recognise that there are several drawbacks. If, a week before a major event such as the Glastonbury or Reading festivals, the weather forecast showed that we were going to be hit by thunderstorms, it would be likely that a large number of people who had purchased tickets would decide that they wanted refunds. I remember going to the Reading festival and emerging covered in mud from head to toe, but many will not relish that prospect. A refund mechanism would make it difficult for a concert promoter organising such a major event to bear the risk, given the uncertainty of the British weather. The whole thing might prove to be a financial disaster because three quarters of tickets sold might be returned, if the forecast was bad. Equally, it was put to us that providing a right to a refund would provide the touts with a one-way bet. They could buy up tickets in the hope that demand would exceed supply, which would mean that they would make large profits. However, they would also have the knowledge that if that did not happen, they could get their money back by returning the tickets. There are problems with a blanket refund policy, but the Committee believes that more should be done by the ticket vendors and organisers of concerts and sporting events to allow refunds for legitimate reasons. There is a refund mechanism for some events, and we welcome the fact that some of the sporting bodies are working with ticketing agencies to try to provide such mechanisms. The Committee concluded that even if such mechanisms were in place, the secondary market, in the main, provided benefit to consumers. It is interesting that other countries have legislated to prevent the secondary market from operating but, in the United States, a number of states are repealing what are known as anti-scalping laws, because they believe that a secondary market serves the consumer. The one matter on which there is almost complete agreement in the primary and secondary markets is that certain practices are quite clearly unacceptable or, indeed, fraudulent. To some extent, that blurs the bigger argument about the desirability of the secondary market. Perhaps the most notorious example is an agency called Getmetickets that was closed down, but re-emerged shortly afterwards as the London Ticket Shop. That was in turn closed down only to re-emerge as London Ticket Express. All were operated by Mr. Michael Rangos, based in Hungary, who was selling tickets that he did not have. People who bought tickets actually never received them. Clearly, that was fraud, and the Department for Trade and Industry was correct to move swiftly to tackle the problem and to close him down, but that demonstrates that more needs to be done to stop such people simply starting up under a different name. Almost everybody in the industry would accept that that is a wholly unacceptable practice that brings into disrepute legitimate secondary agencies, or those that offer consumer guarantees, such as Seatwave or viagogo. We felt that there were two other ways in which some agencies behaved in a fashion that should not be allowed and on which agreement was necessary, the first being the sale of tickets for free events. eBay agreed that it would not sell tickets to the Princess Diana concert, but the Minister's predecessor, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn), had a long argument with the site about Radio 1's Big Weekend festival. Again, tickets for that were distributed free, but they reappeared on eBay at a considerable price. Additionally, the promoter of a series of concerts to be given by Bryan Adams brought the matter to my attention a few weeks ago. Bryan Adams was going on tour to perform an acoustic set, which he had not done before, and the promoter decided that it was going to make tickets available free for the concerts, as an experiment to see how the fans reacted. The tickets were distributed to fans in each area. Even though the tickets did not really exist, they were appearing for sale in the secondary market. We felt strongly that free tickets should not be charged for in the secondary market. Secondly, the Committee felt that there should be agreement for restraint on tickets for events that are set up to raise funds for charity. It is welcome that eBay has accepted that since the report was published. As I said, it is working to reach agreement with the organisers of charitable events so that if tickets are resold on the site, the organiser of the event would benefit financially. Such a voluntary agreement is welcome. We have seen a lot of progress on the establishment of a code of practice. As I said, bodies such as Seatwave and viagogo offer consumer guarantees, but a system whereby all secondary agents offer such guarantees is desirable. The Association of Secondary Ticket Agents has established a code of practice, and it would be desirable to encourage all those in the secondary market to sign up to it.