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Ticket Touting

The hon. Gentleman is entirely wrong to say that such people are defrauding the public. They are offering tickets at transparent prices, and people are making conscious decisions about whether to pay those prices. That is not defrauding people; it is opening up opportunities that people can choose to take up. It is entirely a matter of choice. The hon. Gentleman talked about the police, but who will enforce the laws that have been suggested? In my constituency, the police are already run off their feet trying to deal with more bread-and-butter crime. I am not sure that many of my constituents would want acres of police time to be taken up by seeing whether someone is selling on a ticket at a profit, rather than with maintaining law and order on the streets. In the scheme of things, there is worse criminal activity in the country than people trying to sell on tickets at a profit. I want to discuss sporting events because it seems, from what the Minister has indicated and from the Government response, that they have been nobbled by the sporting bodies on this issue. They should be aware of the motivations behind that and other aspects of certain sporting events. Access to such events, it is said, should be kept open to the ordinary, decent punter, but the Government were quite happy for the cricket to go to Sky. They were happy to deprive millions of people of the opportunity to watch cricket, so I am not sure where their great, high commitment to access to sport comes in, because far more people access sport via television than will ever get the opportunity to go to an event. I am thus not entirely sure that the Government are so much on the side of access, and the same applies to the England and Wales Cricket Board. Rugby union provides us with a good example, and the powerful point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford about the Rugby world cup is worth repeating. Suppose that someone from a particular country buys a ticket for an event thinking that their team is going to get to the final. Indeed, the event does not even have to be international; a Chelsea supporter could buy a ticket for the FA cup final in the expectation that their team is going to get there. For example, an All Blacks supporter might expect their team to get to the final and buy a ticket on that basis. If the policy promoted by the hon. Member for Glasgow, North-West were implemented, thousands of England fans would have been deprived from watching last year's rugby world cup final because he would have disallowed New Zealand supporters from selling on their tickets to England supporters. That would be a rather perverse outcome of a policy. Organisations such as the Rugby Football Union say that they are concerned about the ordinary decent rugby supporter gaining access to their events, but let us consider the ticket allocations for the six nations international games of 2006-07. Can hon. Members guess how many tickets for the England v. Scotland and England v. France matches at Twickenham went on sale to the general public? The answer is a big, fat zero—not one ticket to those two internationals went on sale to the general public. If I were a genuine rugby union fan who wanted to go to one of those internationals, I would have had no opportunity whatever of purchasing tickets for them. The allocations were given to RFU member clubs, debenture holders, other RFU people, visitors, commercial people and sponsors. No tickets were on open sale for the general public. It is no wonder that tickets are happily sold at below cost price, given that they are bringing in such little income; nobody is buying them, because very few are on sale. Most of them are given away to other people.