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Leeds City Council Bill

My hon. Friend is entirely right. I do not understand what ticket touting has to do with pedlars; these are, in many cases, separate issues. That point was conceded by my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) when we debated the Canterbury City Council Bill. Indeed, that Bill's promoters agreed that the inclusion of such a provision was muddying the waters, and they kindly removed the relevant clause. However, the Reading Bill still contains such a clause. I perfectly understand the points that have been made about events such as the Reading festival—I know that that is a big event—but a Bill about pedlars should not be interfering in the wider issue of ticket touting. As the Select Committee found, the secondary market for the sale of tickets is a perfectly legitimate market; it has never been considered otherwise. No one in this country has ever been taken to court because of it. One court case took place in Australia, and the ticket tout won. The Office of Fair Trading made it clear in its evidence to the Select Committee that the secondary market for tickets works in the best interests of the consumer. It does so because people who buy a ticket for an event that they subsequently cannot attend often find that they cannot get a refund. The promoters of events often do not make provision for refunds. People who find subsequently that they cannot go to the event are therefore left with a ticket that they cannot sell on, and that they cannot give back to the promoter, who will not refund them. They have no option but to sell it to someone else, to get their money back or even make a profit. That is in the interests of people in Reading, who want to go to the Reading festival but subsequently find that they cannot. Equally, people who were not sure whether they could go to the Reading festival when the tickets were issued for sale, and therefore did not buy a ticket, but then found that they could go to the event, would be unable, without a secondary market, to exercise their choice—nobody forces them to do it—to pay a perhaps inflated price at a later date.