It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell.

I thank my hon. Friend Emma Foody for securing this important debate. I am glad to hear that she is as passionate as I am about sorting out this broken market. I am happy to see the Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism in his place. We have been on quite a journey together to get to this point and I very much look forward to him fixing all these wrongs in due course.

A lot has happened in the campaign to regulate the secondary ticketing market since I first introduced my private Member’s Bill on the topic back in 2010, which was before Marie Goldman suffered the problems she did in 2012. The problem would have been sorted if the then Member for Shipley had not talked out my private Member’s Bill. However, because of constant lobbying by yours truly and the growing scourge of parasitic touts becoming increasingly sophisticated and ruthless, the new Labour Government have decided to act, as we promised we would in our manifesto.

We now have the watershed opportunity to create the change we desperately need. Over many years in this place we have tried to regulate the market. We have tweaked legislation, first with the Consumer Rights Act 2015, to bring in more transparency because it was said that that was what was needed. But that did not work. Then, with the successful Ban the Bots campaign, we secured an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill in 2017. However, that did not work either: we know that the use of bots and the profits of those using bots for sales are exploding. For a recent Sabrina Carpenter ticket pre-sale of just 10,000 tickets, there were 380,000 bots in the queue attempting to harvest them.

Research published last month by O2, which sells 1 million tickets per year through its priority scheme, estimates that touts cost British music fans an extra £145 million a year, but I suspect that is just the tip of the iceberg. That money is taken from the back pockets of UK audiences and deposited into the bank accounts of offshore retail platforms and the touts who supply their inventory.

Despite uncontrolled touting taking place on an industrial scale, with tickets resold through sites such as Viagogo—there is that name on my lips again—prosecutions were few and far between under the last Government. Led by National Trading Standards, the precedent-setting convictions of just two groups of ticket touts worth millions of pounds each should have opened the floodgates to more action against those who flout the law and use platforms like Viagogo to put profits before fans, but sadly they have not, because resources have run dry. There has not been a single prosecution under the Breaching of Limits on Ticket Sales Regulations 2018 and nor have there been any prosecutions for using bots under the Digital Economy Act 2017, despite our securing the Ban the Bots amendment.

The details of the prosecutions are extraordinary, with touts fraudulently acquiring tens of thousands of tickets and then reselling them through websites such as Viagogo and GetMeIn—which does not exist any more—that were not compliant with UK consumer law. In both cases, it was strongly suggested that the resale platforms were complicit in the touts’ illegal activities.

Incredibly, although the touts were prosecuted and jailed, the resale platforms faced no such sanctions. They kept their cumulative 25% service fees from the illegal transactions—if we do the numbers, we see that means millions of pounds—and they continue to profit from further illicit trading. Where are all the illegal proceeds of crime? Why have they never been recovered?

As the CMA highlighted in 2021, this remains an unregulated market where stronger laws are desperately needed to protect audiences. As stated in the 2016 Waterson review, changes must include properly funding National Trading Standards, which, despite having a budget of only just under £15 million and so much more than just ticket abuse to look at, is the only body to have successfully prosecuted touts. Sadly, despite the mountains of evidence that campaigners such as Adam from FanFair Alliance and myself have provided the CMA with, it has carried out no such prosecutions and is in desperate need of clearer ministerial oversight. I hope that the Minister takes note of that point in particular.

We can see that legislation to outlaw resale for profit or to cap resale prices works in other countries. This is a golden opportunity to ensure that UK audiences receive similar protections and enjoy a capped, consumer-friendly and ethical resale market that works in their interests. Companies such as Viagogo pretend to be legitimate businesses, but the resales are not from fan to fan: they are absolutely dependent on touts committing criminal offences to harvest tickets on an industrial scale then resell them through the website. Citing research from FanFair Alliance just last month, which looked at all the Viagogo listings for 28 shows over the past year at Liverpool’s main mid-size venue, the 1,200-capacity O2 Academy, I can tell hon. Members that only one ticket was listed by a consumer.

This very morning, Sam Fender shows went on sale —we all know him from my region—including a gig in Newcastle’s Utilita arena. Coming from the north-east, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cramlington and Killingworth and I do, we know that Sam’s shows are highly sought after. It is a balloted event, with four tickets per person and only for local postcodes, to try to restrict it and ensure that north-eastern fans get to go. But guess what? There is already a Dubai-based business selling 54 tickets in a single listing. On what site? Viagogo.

As I have stressed time and again, Viagogo has never been penalised in the UK, despite regularly flouting UK legislation, and it has shown repeatedly that it cannot be trusted to mark its own homework. Listen to this: it was fined 7 million Australian dollars for misleading consumers, €20 million for breaking the law in Italy and €400,000 in France for breaking the law around rugby world cup tickets, but it has never been fined a penny here.

Capping ticket resales is a common-sense, cost-free benefit for fans across the country. In fact, cracking down on fraud, which is the most common crime in the UK, could be a net benefit for the country through the proceeds of crime. Although the two cannot be linked precisely, Ireland saw a large drop in fraud after it implemented a version of—guess what?—my private Member’s Bill. For the upcoming Oasis world tour, the only shows for which tickets are not being touted on Viagogo, StubHub and Gigsberg are the two at Croke Park in Dublin.

Although long-term impact reports are still under way, the Irish Government’s official post-enactment report on the Sale of Tickets (Cultural, Entertainment, Recreational and Sporting Events) Act 2021—essentially my private Member’s Bill—concludes:

“This is a positive endorsement of the operation of the Act and means that the objectives of the Act are being met whereby genuine fans can attend events at affordable prices.”

That is what we all seek and what artists and sporting events want to happen when they price their tickets. They know that tickets are worth more, but they do not want to rip off their own fans: they want grassroots sport and the players of the future to be able to attend.

My private Member’s Bill argued for capping resales at face value plus 10%. The 10% exists to account for booking and postage fees. I have never wanted any fans to be out of pocket, not even for the booking fees. I have only ever believed that we need to take out of the reselling of tickets any opportunity to profit, to stop them becoming a commodity that is sold to the highest bidder.

I was happy to see, therefore, Michael Rapino, the chief executive officer of Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, urge Governments in a recent interview with Bloomberg to regulate the business by capping resale. He said that resale prices are 20% above face value, and:

“You shouldn’t have a middleman that has nothing invested in the business make any money from it”— hallelujah! I have been saying that for years.

A 20% cap, though, is still too high, because it leaves room for touts to operate by still harvesting large numbers of tickets to make large amounts of money. That extra 10%, if someone buys enough tickets, will make them a lot of money, especially if dynamic pricing is used as well. But that is recognition from the top of the industry that change is desperately needed—Michael Rapino never said anything like that before we got into government three short months ago.

Furthermore, disagreement over what constitutes face value must also be addressed, given Ticketmaster’s roll-out of dynamic pricing. In February, which was before the recent Oasis debacle, Live Nation unveiled a 36% increase in its annual revenues, to £22.7 billion, and Rapino said:

“Outside of the US, we’re in the first inning…We’re just rolling this out around the world. So that’s the great growth opportunity, obviously.”

Remember, where did they get their money? Fans—off the back of fans, regular people just wanting to see their favourite artist and to take part in the culture.

I am so pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Cramlington and Killingworth made all those points about what it is that makes our heart glad and what it is we want to do in our spare time. We want to see our favourite artist or attend our favourite sporting event, which is why people are so willing to press “Buy” when they see that crazy price. Something within us drives us to that, but culture and enjoyment should be accessible to all of us, no matter how deep or not deep our pockets are.

I am so glad that the Government immediately agreed to include dynamic pricing in their autumn review of ticket resales. I will continue to engage actively with them on this issue and the wider issues in the secondary ticketing market. We must take action to protect fans, venues, artists and athletes. Existing legislation is not good enough. For years we have said, “If we could only enforce what we have,” but we have tried that and it is just not working. I have been campaigning on this issue for more than 15 years. I have worked closely with industry experts and I presented Parliament with the solution back in 2010, with my private Member’s Bill—it is still the only solution. I therefore look forward to this Government making it, or a revision of it, law very soon.