Secondary Ticketing — House of Commons, 2018-06-07
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Richard Michael Bacon (Conservative, Centre-right): I am pleased to have the opportunity to discuss secondary ticketing, which is the process of reselling tickets for admission to events such as live music concerts, rock festivals, football matches, other sporting events, exhibitions and so on. The term "secondary ticketing" refers to tickets that have already been sold for the first time by the organiser of the event, and are then sold on by the ticket holder in the secondary marketplace. In the ticketing industry, the original issuers are generally known as "primaries", and later sellers are known—for obvious reasons—as "secondaries", or more typically as "secondary websites", because the secondary ticketing business overwhelmingly takes place on the internet through online transactions paid for by credit cards I began to take an interest in this issue because of a constituency case, which was the reason I originally applied for this debate. However, those specific matters have recently been caught under the terms of the House’s sub judice rules—I consulted the House authorities and the Principal Clerk of the Table Office at length about that case, and I regret that I cannot now refer to it directly today. None the less, secondary ticketing is clearly a matter of widespread concern among the public whom we represent, as well as among hon. Members, who have held numerous debates on the subject in the House in recent years. The hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) is in the Chamber this evening Secondary ticketing is an area of great controversy that raises important questions about consumer protection, business freedom and responsibility, the ethics or legality of certain types of behaviour, and indeed the clarity of the law and whether it is applied correctly. There are also questions about the structures of the entertainment industries that put on events that require tickets. This is an area in which public policy must be got right and implemented properly, and it is fair to say that there is still considerable work to do Last year, two hon. Members who were active in the all-party group on ticket abuse—the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West and my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams)—were threatened with arrest when they visited the offices of Viagogo, a notorious secondary ticketing website that was operating from premises at 71 Fenchurch Street in the City of London while claiming that it did not have a proper UK office. That happened simply because they wished, as Members of Parliament, to raise concerns with that company about constituents who had been repeatedly ripped off by Viagogo, after it had repeatedly ignored correspondence and requests for meetings Research by the consumer watchdog Which? found that as many as a quarter of tickets to popular concerts and events end up on secondary ticketing websites such as Viagogo. Which? found that 26% of tickets for a show by the comedian Jack Whitehall, and nearly a fifth of tickets to see Lady Gaga at the O2 arena in London, were available on Viagogo and three other resale sites—Get Me In!, Seatwave and StubHub. About 15% of tickets for last year’s first night of the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall were found on secondary ticketing sites, including a £38 ticket with a mark-up of 279% on StubHub, and one with a 300% mark-up on Get Me In! Crucially, Which? discovered that 49% of consumers who bought those tickets believed that they were buying from official sellers, and it is clear that proper consumer protection is required in this area As well as the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West, who has campaigned on this issue for many years, and my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty, another active campaigner is the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who secured a debate on this subject, to which the Minister responded, only last month. The Minister might be getting rather tired of having to come back to the House of Commons, but that is an index of the concern felt by hon. Members across the House There is a wide range of views on what reform is required and what that should look like. One might say that the bookends of the argument could be loosely characterised as ranging from the views of the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire, an experienced rock musician, to that set out in an Institute of Economic Affairs paper written by Dr Stephen Davies. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire stated his view clearly: "I question the need for a secondary market at all. Why is there one? If someone cannot go to a concert they have a ticket for, they should give it back to the venue, which can then resell it to someone who can go. What is wrong with a simple arrangement such as that? We usually hear from people—we have seen it in a couple of articles—that this is all about tickets finding their natural value, as if there is a sort of stock market where tickets find their real value at the hands of the touts reselling them."—[Official Report, 2 May 2018; Vol. 640, c. 165WH.] The IEA, as one might expect, takes a different view, stating: "The fundamental cause of disappointment for many would-be buyers or their having to pay more than a nominated but below-market price is that in these cases"— that is to say where there is enormous interest in obtaining the tickets— "(which to repeat, are not the norm) there is a massive excess of demand over supply. Far more people want to go to the event than can physically attend." The IEA paper is certainly worth reading, although personally I do not think it places sufficient emphasis on the very serious consumer protection issues that have become apparent It is of course true that for any good or service where there is a fashion or fervour to obtain it, the price can be bid up very easily. That happens with Nike, where the manufacturer of very popular training shoes tries to limit supply. It is every supplier, every manufacturer, and every commercial business’s dream to have people fighting over their product and bidding up the price. I remember that when the IKEA store opened in north London, there were literally fights outside because so many people wanted to get in. That might have created a small disturbance, with the police having to be called, but the fact that there was now an IKEA store in that part of north London was all over every newspaper in the country.