I will try to adhere to your guidelines, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I would like to speak to new clause 31, but first I want to congratulate the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) on her campaigning over many years to deal with the abuses in the secondary ticketing market. I also want to congratulate my Select Committee colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams), who took up this issue strongly in the Bill Committee. In fact, the new clause that we are discussing tonight is exactly the same as the one he tabled for discussion in Committee. Such was the power of his argument that he persuaded the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) to pursue this matter on Report, and I am grateful to the shadow Minister for agreeing that the Select Committee could table this new clause for discussion on Report.
Following the Bill’s Committee stage, the Select Committee was so concerned about the bot problem—as the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), described it—and the use of computer programmes to harvest tickets from the primary ticket market in large quantities, that we wanted to look at the matter further. So, between the Committee stage and today’s debate on Report, we called in a number of representatives of the music industry and of the primary and secondary ticketing markets, along with industry experts, to discuss the problem. That left us with the clear view that major abuses are taking place in the ticketing market and that the victims of those abuses are the consumers: the man and woman in the street who want to go to see their favourite performers and concerts but have no chance at all of accessing any tickets.
Computer programmes are harvesting thousands of tickets as soon as they go on sale and immediately transferring them to other websites where they can be bought only at inflated prices. My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) cited an example in Committee of a Phil Collins concert at the Albert Hall next June for which no tickets were available on the Ticketmaster site. However, tickets were available on Ticketmaster’s secondary site at many times their face value, providing a huge margin and handling fee for the secondary site. The venue itself had stated that those tickets were not for resale. When this is happening on a day-to-day basis, there is clearly a problem.
We were also concerned to hear that people in the secondary market in particular felt that it was not their responsibility to police the sale of tickets. As a consequence of that, tickets are routinely sold without the information that is required under consumer protection legislation, which should identify the seller of the ticket as well as the row and seat number, so that they can be identified by the venue. These are routine abuses. The issue of bots harvesting tickets and putting them on immediate resale is an abuse of the system.