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Sale of Tickets (Sporting and Cultural Events) Bill

No, I am going to carry on. A large part of the fundraising activities to support the trust's wonderful work is the running of a series of live entertainment events at the Royal Albert hall, featuring major artists and comedians who give their time for free to support the trust. Last summer, in its 10th year at the Royal Albert hall, it put on nine spectacular gigs featuring Suede, the Who, Noel Gallagher, the Arctic Monkeys, Jimmy Carr and Noel Fielding. As a big fan of talent TV shows, I would particularly have enjoyed seeing JLS, Diana Vickers and Lemar perform on the same night. I see that some Conservative Members are looking confused about some of these names. If they see me afterwards, I will certainly explain any pop culture references that they do not get. I might even be able to put together a compilation CD for them. All these artists freely give their time—as well as that of their support crew—their energy and their talent to support what they view as a worthy cause, but it is not simply a case of artists giving up a night off. Doing a gig in London lessens demand for any other gigs in London that they might have planned close to that date. It could be that they cannot perform in London again for a few weeks or even months, so their participation is a genuine expression of their desire to help the cause. These big names could easily have done other things to earn money on the night they performed. The very fact that they are involved means that demand for tickets is huge. Even though the Teenage Cancer Trust knows that demand for its events could allow it to sell the tickets at a higher price, it wants the events to be affordable to the average fan. As at almost all live entertainment events, tickets are sold at a price below what the market will bear, because organisers recognise the fact that the sustainable approach to putting on live events is to allow as many genuine fans as possible—and especially as many young people as possible—to attend. Quite apart from any moral or ethical consideration, that makes good business sense, building a long-lasting relationship with fans, which could not be achieved if they felt that they were being ripped off or could not even begin to get on the first rung of the ladder. Regular-priced tickets to extraordinary events run by the Teenage Cancer Trust are put on sale with all the standard technological measures in place to combat touts. Like all other big events, they sell out in the space of a morning—sometimes in an hour or two. On the same day, without fail, hundreds of those tickets reappear on secondary websites at massive mark-up prices—well over double their face value.