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Ticket Touting

I hope that hon. Members will bear with me in this game of table tennis across the Chamber. The OFT's seeking of a voluntary code shows that there is an issue to be addressed. Clearly, had it got more staff and resources, this issue might be higher up the agenda compared with other items. The Government's response to some of the criticism of the OFT has missed the point. During the various sessions and in the report, I was criticising the OFT for the amount of time it was taking to reach a decision, not for not addressing the issue at all. I urge more speed. I should like to address what might be covered by the voluntary code. We are at a disadvantage because we still do not have a draft to comment on, either in the Government's response or in this debate. The Committee focused on three instances of abuse: free tickets; allocation for the disabled and children; and the situation regarding amateur sports clubs. Clearly, with regard to free tickets, the Government could not be clearer, because their response says:"““The Government agrees with the Committee's views about the sale of free tickets””." However, I am afraid that they are silent on the other categories. I should like to hear a little bit more from the Minister about whether other categories of concern might be included in the draft code. In respect of amateur sports clubs, which are close to my heart through my involvement in rugby union, the Rugby Football Union distributes tickets to amateur clubs by allocation. Most of the clubs are scrupulous and give their members a fair chance, often by ballot, to get those tickets, but a small minority are unscrupulous. A small minority of clubs, officers or lucky recipients will simply sell their tickets on the black market. That denies ordinary members who want to go to a fixture a chance of doing so, be it Mrs. Bloggs or not. It also places a disproportionate cost for policing fixtures on the Rugby Football Union and all the administrative bodies. In 2006, for example, 157 RFU clubs, schools and universities, and some debenture holders had their allocations reduced because they sold their tickets on the black market, in breach of the terms and conditions. The cost of that is high for the administrative body, which takes out resources that could otherwise be ploughed into developing the game and grass-roots sport. I accept some of the points that have been made. The industry should do more to identify certain tickets and, by making them appear different, highlight the risk to those buying them and those willing to sell them of people with such tickets being refused entry. I also accept that there must be much better mechanisms for authorised reselling. For example, during the rugby world cup in Paris—this has nothing to do with the home unions—there was not a reselling mechanism. Frankly, most of the Kiwis and Aussies, whose teams were knocked out earlier, were still in Paris against their will. It was a great joy to see rows of miserable faces outside the pubs and cafés of Paris, but they should not have been in that situation and there should have been an authorised reselling mechanism. I hope that, when we win the world cup in 2015, those arrangements will be far better administered by the home unions here or the English RFU than they were by the French and the International Rugby Board. I would still like to see some protection in the code, when it emerges, for ordinary members receiving allocations from amateur sports clubs. I want to touch on the practice, which was criticise in the report, of so-called futures selling, whereby tickets are advertised for sale by secondary sellers before they have even been marketed. The likes of eBay, Seatwave and viagogo have definitely been selling tickets that they could not possibly have. There are clear consumer protection issues. Hon. Members only have to look at the evidence provided by Harvey Goldsmith about eBay's attitude to people who offer tickets fraudulently: people pay up and the tickets never appear, but eBay effectively does not want to know. Now, eBay is a big corporation and the buyers are small individuals, so what can they do? The Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform might want to look at wider issues of protection regarding buying on the internet.