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Ticket Touting

It is a great privilege to take part in a parliamentary debate with a ringside seat as a spectator of the inside workings of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. All parliamentarians want to see how well our Select Committees are not only scrutinising what the Government are doing, but contributing to future policy and guiding the direction of travel. Stoke-on-Trent is the birthplace of Robbie Williams, and it is good to hear in this debate that he is recognised as a national icon. So many people in Stoke-on-Trent and the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme want ringside seats at his concerts. The debate has shown that the Government's response to the Committee's detailed report on ticket touting sets out the importance of ensuring that major sporting and music events should not go ahead if they exploit fans. In taking the report forward—whatever differences of opinion there may be, or votes against the majority view—the thrust of the Government's policy should be to be fair to fans and to ensure that ticket touting does not undermine the integrity of our sporting organisations. They must ensure that ticket touting does not result in concerts that only those with a lot of money can afford to attend. The Government must ensure that in the cultural life of our cities and town—the Axis festival is starting this evening in Stoke-on-Trent, and I hope that we shall complete our proceedings in time to enable me to get home to attend its launch—we have the equivalent of grass roots music so that we have the big, showcase, Crown jewel concerts. They must deal with ticket touting and ensure that fans, concert-goers and followers can be there at every step along the way when they want to. I hope that the report will inform the Minister's general direction of travel. At this stage of the debate, almost everything that can be said has been said, and I want to broaden it. I congratulate the Chairman of the Select Committee on the way in which he spoke about its conclusions this afternoon, and clearly set out the role of secondary ticketing and whether there is a third way of dealing with it. I very much hope that the Minister will find that third way. In the environmental area, I do a lot of work on my Select Committee and voluntary action has been a much more forceful route than regulation or law enforcement. I hope that the Minister will be able to adopt that approach. To use an analogy with environmental issues, prevention is often the best cure. Having read the report and given thought to the evidence, I wonder whether in its inquiry, the Select Committee was slightly narrow in terms of the bigger picture. I suggest to the Committee and the Minister that when they consider cultural diversity in music and sport, and fairness for everyone, they should also consider what can be done to prevent ticket touting. I made a special point of being here today because I want to draw the Minister's attention to a scheme that Port Vale football club in my constituency is launching. It wants to invite 5,000 people to become season ticket holders. The scheme is innovative and in the vanguard of bringing sport back to its grass roots—I hope that the Minister will refer to that—and follows on from the work at Bradford City football club. Faced with ticket prices that people could not afford, Bradford City aimed for a figure of 7,000 people, and if it is successful, next year it can double the number of spectators. Will the Minister commend and congratulate Port Vale football club on the scheme that it is introducing? It has until the end of May to find those 5,000 people. Football ticket touting is centred on a small number of premiership glamour clubs. The cost of tickets at such grounds is high, but not many times higher than those for most normal matches at most lower league grounds. If we can make football affordable and accessible to most people at most clubs, we will go further on the way to alleviating the compulsion to attend a few super-clubs. In doing so, we will both nourish struggling local clubs and remove the demand bottlenecks on which the tickets touts depend. Dealing with the problem in that way is the way forward. Despite what the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) said, the flow of television money to the top of the game effectively subsidises the admission prices of the top clubs. In turn, that makes admission prices at lower league clubs, which do not benefit from such bountiful windfalls, appear prohibitively expensive. Developments at Port Vale football club, in my constituency, attempt to make league football available to adults for under £8 a game. I hope that at some stage, we might have a Robbie Williams concert there, in which case we will need the issue of ticket touting to have been dealt with. The radical scheme to secure 5,000 season ticket holders is a positive move to prevent live football from becoming a luxury item, and to make it a regular part of the lives of many people. Port Vale is already very much a family club: mums, dads, grandmas, granddads, children, sons, daughters, granddaughters, grandsons—all go to the club together. Like many other clubs, such as Telford United, it is establishing itself as the hub of the local community. If the launch of the season ticket programme for 5,000 people is successful, following on from the brave steps taken by Bradford City last season, it will mark the beginning of a trend to reduce prices in the interest of encouraging greater attendance. If more football fans felt intimately connected to their local clubs and attended the local ground weekly, the pressure caused by the seemingly inexorable cycle of popular interest and wealth experienced by only a handful of top clubs would be alleviated. The excessive demand currently directed at top clubs and exploited by touts would be spread more evenly throughout football, to the benefit of everyone concerned. When the Minister replies, I would be grateful if he referred to the wonderful, groundbreaking work of Port Vale football club and shared with other parliamentarians how dealing with ticket touting can help diversity in grass-roots football.