Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:

Moved by Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury

15: Clause 3, page 2, line 35, leave out “three” and insert “four”Member’s explanatory statementThis probing Amendment, and others in the name of Baroness Bonham-Carter, adds a condition for Sporting Events to be covered by this Bill, to make the sporting event free to air.

In moving Amendment 15 I shall speak also to Amendments 26 and 79. We on these Benches think that we should consider events that are in scope of this Bill as part of the free-to-air listed events regime for audiences in the UK, so that those who wish to follow a sporting event but cannot obtain a ticket due to cost or availability can still follow the event without incurring extra costs and potentially having to pay for a subscription; and, secondly and really importantly, because it will encourage and expand the audience for such events. Watching a sport you do not know can spark interest and participation. There are more chances that this will happen if the event is not behind a paywall.

The Minister mentioned the Lionesses. Thanks to the BBC championing and broadcasting women’s football free to air, enabling the public to watch the Lionesses’ triumphant journey in both European and world tournaments, there are new audiences in stadiums, as well as on screens; and, most importantly, it has inspired women and girls to take up the sport. Similarly, there is the legacy of Channel 4 and the Paralympics, and I refer to what the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said earlier about encouraging and enabling disabled kids to get involved in sport.

It is in the power of the DCMS to review listed events—the “crown jewels”, as they are known. The amendment I am proposing would create an opportunity to revise the list, and this follows a concerning trend where fans’ rights to enjoy events on free-to-air television have been gradually eroded. For the first time, the finals of the Champions League—football is the sport of the day—Europa League and Conference League were all behind a paywall. If the Government intend to host such great sporting events in the UK, as we have been discussing today, the British public deserve the right to be able to watch them.

My Lords, I rise with great pleasure to follow the Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, who is very much the leader of your Lordships’ House in this space. I am here having signed Amendments 15 and 26 to show cross-party support, so I will be brief.

As the noble Baroness set out, we have seen a gradual erosion of people’s access. We often discuss access to the right to participate in sport, but there is also the access to being part of the whole sporting experience and to view major events live. Free-to-air broadcast is what keeps major sporting events genuinely public, rather than turning them into elite viewing that is available only to those who can afford subscription television or other sources. If access depends on payment, watching sport becomes unevenly distributed, with lower-income households at a clear disadvantage. In practice, that particularly excludes, or risks excluding, many children and young people from the shared experience of watching major sporting events with their peers and their communities. Free-to-air coverage ensures that money is not a barrier to participation in what is a common cultural space, where sport is experienced collectively rather than privately. That broad access is something that gives sport extra public value, and that is why it is important to protect it as something that belongs to everyone, not just those who can pay.

My Lords, I disagree with the proposed amendments for a number of different reasons; first, because the terminology “free to air” is a complete misdescription. You have to pay £180 for your TV licence. It therefore is not free—that is, for the 88% of the population who choose to pay for their TV licence. The number of people who choose not to pay for a TV licence has been rising for many years. I say 88% because the latest figures published say that 12.5% of all viewers do not pay for a television licence.

Secondly, there is the question of competition. The essence of sport is competition. It is a very odd state of affairs whereby one says that broadcasters can compete but, by the way, we will restrict the competition in certain fields. We were debating in the previous set of amendments the question of assisting people who face disadvantages in society. Again, it is a very odd state of affairs whereby one broadcaster might be willing to pay much larger sums to broadcast a particular event, and in that process guarantee substantial funds to the underrepresented groups, but they are not allowed to because the event concerned is a crown jewel. So not only do you lose out because the broadcasting may be inferior; the funding might be inferior as well.

Thirdly, my concern is that the crown jewels were a product of a different technological era. Sport is now broadcast on a whole range of different platforms, and none of us in this Chamber knows what the platforms are going to be in five or 10 years’ time. Therefore, to decree in this piece of legislation that you can have certain sporting events, and I noticed that it suggested that they might be extended only on—I will use the jargon although I have indicated that I do not agree with it—a free-to-air basis, when multiple levels of platforms will probably be available in a few years’ time does not recognise the changing technological world in which we live and which the sporting world will have to adapt to.

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 26. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, makes an interesting reference to free-to-air. As well as not knowing what platforms are going to be available, we do not know even what events there are going to be. The Olympics and Paralympics are going to change radically in the next few cycles, not least because of the impact of global warming. In quite good timing, there was an article this morning online on the Broadcast Sport website which talked about the changing world of events. Rights holders have more choices about where to go to put their events on, and they can ask for more money. It has been estimated that FIFA is going to make about £3 billion from organising the World Cup. Where is that money going to go? If you look at something closer to home such as Wimbledon, it puts a considerable amount of money back into the grass roots, which is incredible.

How people watch is going to change as well. The same article on Broadcast Sport was saying that even if you are watching a live event, you are probably checking your phone at least 10 times during that event to see what else is going on and what other comments are being made. We should be looking at how we make available these major sporting events. A number of people are disappointed that the Commonwealth Games is not going to be readily available, certainly on BBC TV. Everything that Team Wales does is going to be shown on S4C. There will be two hours’ live coverage a day, which is amazing—in Welsh, which is really important in terms of continuing to develop the Welsh language. I am sure there will be lots of other home country athletes competing who will be seen within those time slots. I do not think we can underestimate the importance of being able to watch the Games.

If we look back through history—we have been talking about this today—when the BBC covered the Sydney Paralympics in 2000, one of the decisions behind putting the Games on at teatime was so that schoolchildren could watch the Games. That developed a much better understanding of disability and the Paralympics. It got an age group of children watching sport that they probably would not have been able to see before. Whether it is free to air or however we define that, it is important that the public in the widest possible sense are able to watch these events in real time without spending some quite significant sums sometimes on monthly fees.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. Broadcasting is such a critical part of the sporting experience. For most people broadcast is the sporting experience. When Andy Murray was performing so fabulously on Centre Court at Wimbledon, I believe there were 15,000 seats available, yet millions could enjoy and experience that extraordinary event from the edge of their sofa. This is another area where the Bill is unfortunately silent when it comes to innovation. I believe there are solutions which can offer new paths forward to enable spectators to enjoy their favourite sport and these events through various media.

I will give two examples. I declare a previous interest in that I was deputy chair of Channel 4 Television at the time. When Emma Raducanu went all the way through to the final and won the US Open, we were able to do a deal at 24 hours’ notice with Amazon, which was the rights holder at the time, to have the US Open on Channel 4 free to air. But it is not free to air, as my noble friend Lord Hayward points out. It is a domestic UK broadcaster which was not a rights holder, but because of thinking differently, getting into discussions and a broader relationship with Amazon, it was able to secure those rights without in any sense cannibalising the rights that Amazon had paid for. A similar deal was done with England men’s cricket when it was in India that winter. I give just those two examples because they illustrate that there has to be flexibility and innovation in terms of both the deals that can potentially be done and the various media by which spectators are able to enjoy and support these tremendous events.

My Lords, very briefly, after so many events going on, free-to-air means not hidden behind a paywall. It is something you do not have to make a very big payment to. Okay, there is the licence fee. To the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, I say, “Yes, touché. Well done, good point”. But the fact of the matter is that if you do not have to specifically pay to see them, people can get to these great sporting events and, as the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, has just pointed out, you create a national memory of them, something which you can refer back to. It is the water-cooler moment that does not go away. It is a point of bonding which you do not get anywhere else.

I hope that when the Minister responds she will give us some idea about how we are going to carry on with this, because it is a changing world. The first time I discussed this, we knew it was going to be on X number of channels, and Sky was only just starting to come into it. But we have been able to watch, at least in the form of highlights. What is the defence? It is a big deal. We must make sure, for these huge events, especially when national teams or the big games come up, that we respond across the board so that people can come down. I hope the Minister can say something reassuring on this because, let us face it, it is one of the reasons why it is worth bidding in the first place. It is now beyond those who go and buy tickets and has been for a long time.

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Hayward issued a useful corrective. Just as there is no such thing as government money but only taxpayers’ money, there is no such thing as free-to-air broadcasting; we pay for it through some means or another. It is a timely reminder in a year when we look again at the BBC’s royal charter and the licence fee model, which pays not just for the BBC but is required for viewing any of our public service broadcasters.

We are in many senses overdue a debate about the listed events regime by which we try to pick those crown jewels of sporting events. We would have had one during the passage of what became the Media Act 2024, but because that was taken in wash-up, we did not have the debate that perhaps was needed then. I hope that as we look at the royal charter for the BBC, we can look at this in some detail. Maybe the Minister can say a bit about that either now or at subsequent stages on the Bill.

This was looked at at Second Reading by my noble friend Lady Davies of Devonport, who spoke powerfully about the fact that if public money—taxpayers’ money—is spent on hosting major sporting events, we want as many of those taxpayers as possible to be able to see, benefit and be inspired by them. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, was right about the importance of visibility and prominence, particularly of the Paralympic Games, which has done so much to change people’s perceptions of those with disabilities and brought so many broadcasters and commentators with disabilities on to our screens when so many people are watching with great pride and excitement.

Like the noble Baroness, I share some sadness that the Commonwealth Games will not be broadcast on the BBC this year, for the first time since the Games began in 1950. The live rights have gone to TNT Sports and only highlights will be available on a public service broadcaster—Channel 5. One thinks of seminal moments such as Roger Bannister’s “miracle mile” and the people who will not be able to be inspired by moments such as that.

I look forward to the Minister’s response. It links very much to the debates we need to have over the BBC’s royal charter and paying for our public service broadcasters. Again, this hits at the problem we have in the Bill. We are trying to set up a framework anticipating what the world will look like many years hence in many different ways that have a knock-on effect for sporting life in this country.

I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for their amendments. Amendments 15 and 26 seek to add a further condition to the Bill’s framework, requiring any qualifying sporting event to make live coverage free of charge to the UK public. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, about the importance of having, for example, the Lionesses on the BBC and the Channel 4 coverage of the Paralympics.

I and the Government recognise the intent behind these amendments and are committed to ensuring that major sporting events are as accessible as possible to people across the UK, including where broadcasting is concerned. Indeed, during the debate on the football regulator, one of the discussions we had was about what made a spectator and what made a fan. For most people, it is not watching it live but instead watching it largely on television.

However, unfortunately, these amendments are not ones that the Government can support. The central issue is that they would make the application of this framework dependent on broadcasting arrangements having already been secured on free-to-air—I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, which was repeated by the noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Parkinson, that it is not free-to-air but rather it is free-to-air once you have paid your licence fee or an equivalent free-access basis.

Decisions relating to the broadcast coverage of sporting events are commercial matters for broadcasters, event organisers and the holders of broadcasting rights. Those organisations are operationally independent of government, and rightly so. Broadcasting rights provide essential income for national governing bodies and sport broadcasting rights holders, which enables them to invest in their sports, future events and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said, grass-roots sports. She cited the example of Wimbledon, but there are other examples from across the piece. This Amendment would place tighter controls over their ability to generate much-needed broadcasting revenue for an indefinite period.

There is also a practical concern. The timelines for agreeing broadcasting rights will not always align with the bidding processes and other requirements that this framework is intended to support. Making the framework conditional on those agreements already being in place could therefore create delay, uncertainty and unnecessary rigidity. Other bidding nations may not be subject to such restrictions, potentially making the UK less competitive.

The Government are absolutely committed to ensuring that there is a breadth of free-to-air coverage of sporting events for licence fee payers. I agree with all noble Lords who stressed the importance of people seeing sport. The current listed events regime is designed to ensure that sporting events of national significance are available to as wide an audience as possible by prohibiting exclusive broadcasting of the event without prior consent from ofcom.

In response to the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, made about people being potentially excluded by dint of their economic circumstances, the listing of events ensures that broadcast rights to that event, if offered, must be made available on fair and reasonable terms to the free-to-air channels received by 95% of the population.

The Government believe that the current listed events regime works well and strikes a perfect balance between encouraging free-to-air access to a number of sporting events for audiences and allowing sports to maximise broadcasting revenue to invest in the growth and development of those sports. I note the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that the ability to talk about having seen major sporting events is a bonding event, which can exclude people who are not able to take part in that. In any event, we would expect broadcasters and sporting rights holders for specific events to think carefully about the balance between generating much-needed revenue and ensuring access to sports coverage for viewers, ensuring the growth and development of the sport.

Amendment 79 seeks to ensure that where the Secretary of State gives financial assistance under Clause 25 in respect of a sporting event, she must require the recipient to take all reasonable steps to ensure that live coverage of that event is made available free of charge, either directly or on a platform accessible without subscription in the United Kingdom. The Government fully recognise the importance of broadcasting certain sporting events to attract significant audience interest and make events as accessible as possible. We appreciate the sentiment that, where public support is involved, sporting events should be as widely available to the public as possible. However, again, this amendment is not one that the Government can accept.

The first reason is one of principle. Clause 25 is a funding power, intended to support the effective delivery of sporting events. It is not a broadcasting regulation power, nor is it intended to be used to direct or shape the outcome of commercial negotiations over media rights. Broadcasting arrangements for sporting events are matters for broadcasters, event organisers or the holders of the broadcasting rights, all of whom are operationally independent of government. It would not be appropriate to use the Bill or this funding power to intervene in those negotiations indirectly through grant conditions.

Secondly, funding decisions, event planning and broadcast rights negotiations do not always proceed to the same timetable. As a result, the amendment could create delay, complication and uncertainty in the use of Clause 25 support.

Thirdly, there is a risk to workability. If organisers or recipients cannot be confident about satisfying such a condition at the relevant point in time, it may make financial assistance harder to administer and could reduce the flexibility that Clause 25 is designed to provide.

For those reasons, I respectfully ask the noble Baronesses, Lady Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury and Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, not to press their amendments.

I thank everyone for taking part in this debate—except possibly the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, who is making me have to think of a different way of saying “free to air”. I am, of course, disappointed but actually not surprised by the Minister’s response. She has given me valuable time but I hope we can explore this further.

To pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said, the crown jewels debate got cut off at the knees. We have charter renewal coming up. I totally respect what everyone says about the future and things changing every day, but we need to discuss this because it is important that we share these things. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, that the paywall is the paywall and means that things become niche rather than shared; that is the thing we are really trying to overcome here. I beg leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment 15 withdrawn.

Amendments 16 to 26 not moved.

Clause 3 agreed.

Clause 4 agreed.

Clause 5: Ticket touting regulations

Debate on whether Clause 5 should stand part of the Bill.

My Lords, it may seem surprising that I oppose Clause 5 standing part of this Bill, given the fact that I have argued many times in your Lordships’ House for taking tough action against the abuse of the secondary market in ticketing. The reason I do is that I think this is in the wrong Bill. Going back to 19 November, just last year, the Government announced that they would introduce new rules to prohibit tickets for concerts, theatre, comedy, sports and other live events being resold for more than their original cost. They made a significant policy announcement that the British Government would introduce new rules to ban ticket touting. They then said they would introduce a Bill in this Session. They did not. They introduced a draft Bill that would make it illegal to resell a ticket at more than its original cost, cap service fees, make it illegal to resell more tickets than you are entitled to buy, place obligations on resale platforms, and empower the Competition and Markets Authority to impose tough fines. Whether we get the legislative timetable for that is yet to be seen.

In this Bill, for potentially three or four events in the next 10 years, there is very tough action, which I support in principle but it should apply to all sports, cultural, arts and music events, and it should be in primary legislation, as promised by the Government. It is simply inconsistent to put some extremely tough and onerous measures—which I fully support—in this Bill for three or four major sporting events that might take place over the next 10 or 15 years and not fulfil their clear obligation to the country to introduce primary legislation as soon as possible to cover this in detail.

We are in danger of having a series of different restrictions on secondary market sales. The original one covered football and was brought in for a completely different reason—it was about segregation of football fans. More recently, we have had further legislation in an excellent Private Member’s Bill, which was introduced in the last Session. There is no reference in this legislation as to how that would be implemented with major international events that we are trying to attract to this country.

Then there is the London 2012 Act, which had the full support of the House at the time. It looked specifically at relevant legislation for hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in this country and criminalised the abuse that we saw in the secondary market for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. I am in no doubt at all that the technology that will be used in ticket touting in years to come will change rapidly. By the time we next host the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, we will need to consider in detail legislation that will be very different from this Bill.

It is inconsistent not to introduce primary legislation to cover this in detail for cultural events, music events and festivals, as well as the overwhelming Majority of sporting events that are not covered by this Bill, but just for the three or four international events that we are trying to attract to this country over the next 10, 15 or 20 years. It is that inconsistency which concerns me most of all and is why I object to Clause 5 standing part of the Bill.

Very briefly, and less relevantly, because it would be appropriate for me to put my arguments forward on the significant abuse of the secondary market another time, it is sad that the CMA is the nominated enforcement agency here. I recommend that the Government seriously consider removing it. It has prosecuted no one. It has done very little. It has looked into all sorts of cases and achieved far less than National Trading Standards, whose work has led to people being jailed. National Trading Standards is on a £13 million budget—a very small budget—but has been particularly effective. It has taken down social websites and been really effective in this area. I regret that the Government feel that the CMA will be more appropriate.

Next, if we are talking about specific international events then I am concerned about FIFA. When it came to the World Cup that we are enjoying at present, FIFA decided not to take specific measures in the host nation contract with the US, Canada and Mexico, partially, no doubt, because of the interests of President Trump, who has no appetite to ban touting in the US. But at the same time, FIFA has now set up its own retail site and is taking 15% off the seller and 15% from the buyer. How that fits with this legislation is an interesting question, particularly if it changes its approach to ticket touting in the future. I have no doubt whatever that FIFA will want to protect that source of income post the current World Cup.

It is important that DCMS is seen to be very even-handed in considering this important issue. It is taking very tough action in this Bill but, as I have mentioned, for potentially three or four events and not for the world of sports and the world of music. Those involved in those industries are desperately keen to see tough action taken, as the Government promised, but there is little evidence that they are going to pursue that. Yet Eric Baker, CEO of StubHub and Viagogo, has been publicly professing how happy he is that he has kicked the can down the road and educated the Government, which is why the Bill is not currently before Parliament. I hope that is incorrect. I hope there is no evidence to that effect and that what he is saying publicly is erroneous. As I understand it, he has had five meetings with the department, yet there have been no meetings for those who, quite rightly and understandably, feel very strongly that very tough action should be taken against the abuse of the secondary market, which is what I am focused on here.

Finally, we should make sure that football is included in this. It is an Olympic sport and would need to be covered by this legislation, clearly. There could not be separate legislation for football if we were trying to attract an international sporting event, either a FIFA or IOC event. We should also be very cautious about how it applies to debentures and hospitality. Unpicking that for touting will be a significant challenge.

I want to state on record that I am absolutely in favour of the direction that the Government have taken in this Bill, but I think it is in the wrong place. It is in the wrong Bill at the wrong time, and it should be more appropriately introduced before Parliament as the Government promised. Parliament should be allowed to determine what that should look like, and then the decision of Parliament should be implemented in the context of this legislation moving forward.

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 31. I wish to associate myself with the words of my noble friend Lord Moynihan. This is an unnecessary provision in the wrong Bill. At Second Reading, I posed the question: what is so bad about somebody who has bought a ticket to the match but suddenly finds they cannot go and offers it for sale to friends on Facebook that justifies a 50 grand fine?

You have a spare ticket. Perhaps mum has fallen over at home so you cannot go. Perhaps the girlfriend you had planned to go with is now seeing somebody else. Perhaps you have gone down with some sort of food poisoning or perhaps even gramps, who you had planned to sit next to, has died. It happens. In all those circumstances, there are draconian penalties for moving on that ticket. The ticketing activities are enumerated in Schedule 1: selling an event ticket, offering for sale an event ticket, exposing for sale an event ticket or advertising that the ticket is available for purchase.

The £50,000 fine is a level of punishment that outweighs the typical criminal penalties for shoplifting, burglary and serious breaches of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act. I am not sure there is an equivalence between passing on a ticket and negligently permitting an employee to fall to his death from height. How have we found ourselves in a situation where the state ranks the desire to cut your losses as worse than all these crimes? It is two-tier justice.

Why are we compounding the sadness of the girl whose boyfriend does not want to go to the game with her any more? We are going after the wrong people. Can we not just get a sense of perspective and materiality here and recognise that somebody who buys six tickets for them and their rellies is not a member of a crime family? My amendment would limit it to six tickets for an event and provide a carve-out to the penalties in the Bill—the abuses that my noble friend has referred to.

At Second Reading, I explained that the organisers and selected ticket agents have not done enough to stop the bots and their industrial hoovering up of the tickets. We all want to ensure that real fans get a fair shot at going to the game; that is common ground. The truth is that the sellers have not tried hard enough to stop this. The truth, as my noble friend has just alluded to, is that the status quo suits them just fine. They can carry on as they are, clutching pearls, pretending to be concerned by the bots while trousering all the cash and filling the cash box on day one. This Bill, if passed, means that they do not even have to try to fix this problem. We are letting them off the hook by law.

There are all sorts of technical ways of matching claimants to people. If we cannot authenticate individuals, the economic basis of society—whether for banking, passport applications or driving licences—cannot proceed. This is a problem that has been solved. Indeed, if it had not been, the hated ID card scheme would be even more dead in the water than it is today.

I went to a wedding last weekend, and a lady I met—I was with my wife, but there was another lady—told me that she had been banned from Tinder for having two profiles, an A one and a B one. She was banned for life. If Tinder can see through multiple personalities, it should not be so difficult for Ticketmaster. If Tinder can suss out the dupes and the fakes, why can agencies such as Ticketmaster—others are available—not do so? It is a simple question and one that needs to be answered by the Government before they go after the jilted girlfriend or the grieving son.

My approach would be to ensure that the organisers go the extra mile to authenticate ticket purchasers in the secondary market. The Government’s solution is victim blaming, going after the little guy—the buyer whose mum fell over at home and has a black eye. The Bill has this the wrong way around. Why should we go to the millions of fans when the organisers have the tools to sort it out, if only they could be bothered? Instead, we are being asked to give them the legal cover not to bother to fix this scourge at source. It is just not good enough.

My amendment would exempt those with six tickets or fewer in a single transaction for a single event who then seek to move them on for whatever reason. It would absolve them from committing an offence. Buying six tickets is not an industrial-scale activity. It strikes the right balance between individual freedoms and the reality of the world, where things change all about us—especially if you need to buy these tickets so many months in advance.

Rather than ban resales except back to the organisers—as has just been mentioned, we can see with FIFA’s World Cup what happens when you do that; FIFA has questions to answer, but this Bill would prevent those questions being asked by law—we should regulate the secondary market. An integral part is to provide the assurance that the ticket being offered is not a fake. This is a market problem that has been solved. If somebody wants to sell on a ticket, the potential purchaser can ask the seller via a website or API for certain details—say a combination of the seat number and serial number. The organiser responds as to whether it is an authentic combination or not. In the jargon, it is called interoperability.

Rather than the monopoly preferred by the organisers, who would want a monopoly, two individuals who meet on Facebook or peer-to-peer platforms such as StubHub—which provide much-needed liquidity to all manner of ticketed events—could be assured between themselves and we could streamline a regulated process. Let us regulate rather than ban the secondary market, while placing the onus on the organisers to enforce identity checks at the outset to stop the bots.

I know the Minister does not like this, but let us examine her stated alternative preference. It is to allow the purchaser to surrender the tickets back to the organiser for monopoly resale to someone else. Where are the safeguards to prevent that organiser selling them on at more than the original face value and acting as a state-sponsored ticket tout?

I asked the organiser of an event in scope, and he explained that you should be able to surrender your ticket back to the organisers for resale as little as 30 minutes before the game. That is lunacy. All it does is encourage hopefuls to hang around the turnstiles and then be disappointed with 10 minutes to go when suddenly there are no tickets to buy. It is the perfect recipe to charge the entrance—exactly the behaviour that we want to prevent but which this cack-handed legislation will aid and abet.

All this Bill does is give FIFA, the Olympics, UEFA and, if we accept some of the amendments from my noble friend Lady Evans, other less illustrious event organisers a state-sponsored monopoly to do what they want on tickets at the expense of the fan and the family member who is unable to go to the game. Why are the peer-to-peer sites such as StubHub or your Facebook friends to be banned instead of being encouraged to participate in a regulated market-based authentication process? Why can the Government not get their story straight about how the mechanics of ticket surrender might work? How would we prevent state-sponsored monopolies and other unintended consequences, such as charging the turnstiles? Why are we criminalising the little guy while providing statutory air cover for the organisers to repeat the World Cup ticket fiasco with empty stadiums and disappointed fans?

This Government are not learning or explaining how this will work. Once again, they are on the side of big business, not the fan or the single family member who has to move on that ticket because his girlfriend is not his girlfriend any more.

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 28A. The Bill usefully sets out that regulations in relation to ticket touting will be brought in for sporting events. But a number of organisations, including UK Music, are understandably asking the Government to completely fulfil their manifesto commitment. In this sense, I am coming to the issue from a similar place to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, although I disagree with his remedy. It is right that we should do this because we need to end exploitative ticket touting across all types of events. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and I have been on the same side on this for many years.

Like many on these Benches, I am delighted at the progress that has been made on ticket touting for sports events, but I am puzzled about the wait for legislation covering music and other events. What makes it more puzzling is that music and sports events often take place in the same venues. This week, my wife will go to listen to Harry Styles; a few weeks ago, I could have gone to the same Wembley venue to watch the cup final. So I am sure that the Minister will understand why there is a measure of disappointment, particularly among music fans, event organisers and performers, none of whom derive any benefit from the current situation.

According to YouGov research commissioned by O2, online ticket touts are costing UK music fans at least £145 million a year. For some time, UK Music has been calling for legislation that includes a resale price cap to prohibit someone from reselling a ticket for more than the original ticket value, service fee limits to ensure that price caps cannot be undermined by inflated fees or hidden charges placed on consumers, and volume limits to make it unlawful to buy more tickets for an event than one individual is permitted to buy on the primary market. Taken together, those measures would create transparency for ticket purchasers and create a more level playing field for consumers.

My amendment 28A would simply require the Secretary of State to review the ticket touting provisions in Clauses 5 and 6 within 12 months of the Act coming into force and report to Parliament on their effectiveness. This review would provide an important opportunity to assess whether similar protections should be extended to the music sector and music events. I am conscious that a draft Bill is to be published in this Session, but I am also conscious that these things have a habit of slipping and falling foul of other priorities. We have yet to see the terms of the wider legislation, so can we better understand why sport has come forward first, and what makes the challenges of policing this area different or more complex for music?

Music fans face many of the same challenges as sports fans: tickets being acquired in bulk and resold at inflated prices, and genuine fans being priced out of events. The draft Bill, announced in the King’s Speech, means that music fans will continue to face inflated resale prices and unfair ticketing practices while they wait for reform. If the ticket touting provisions prove effective in the sporting context, the review should urgently consider whether comparable measures should be applied to music events, ensuring greater fairness and consumer confidence in protections. I have tabled this amendment to try to achieve a speedier route to having equity across all sporting, cultural and music events, because those who support those events—music fans, sports fans, or whatever—deserve that equality of consideration.

My Lords, it is pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, and to take part in this group. I am physically and actually right behind my noble friend Lord Moynihan on these issues: it is a good provision, but it is the wrong position. It offers a solution that is fine for those critically important but few events that it will cover, but, for the vast Majority, it is a tantalisingly close yet elusive solution across the rest of sport, music, culture, et cetera.

“World in Motion”, 1990; “Football’s Coming Home”, Euro 96: music and sport have always been inextricably linked, yet the Bill has not only missed the opportunity to bind these together with effective ticket touting provisions, it has also unfortunately set out a solution for the very few—which, understandably, is extraordinarily frustrating for the many. The provision is also unfortunate because it is very analogue and does not seem to speak to ticketing, touting and abuse as they are today—never mind how they will be in five, 10, 15 or 20 years’ time, when thinking about an Olympic Games and Paralympic Games bid in the 2040s.

I will speak to Amendments 27, 89, and all the amendments in my name in this group. I will start with Amendment 89, which proposes an accessible ticketing duty on all these events. For this, I use “accessible” in the broadest sense of the word. This goes to discussions that we have had in earlier groups around ensuring that we get the right principles threaded into this legislation. When we were putting together the ticketing strategy for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, all the weight of history was on us: all the rules, structures and expectations of what had gone before at all the previous 29 Olympic Games. Of course, there was a lot of good and a lot to follow in that, but, equally, we were the first people to be delivering an Olympic Games and a Paralympic Games in London in 2012. We not only took that incredibly seriously but took it for what it was: a once-in-a-generation opportunity. So we should seek to test, stretch and develop those principles that have been set out in all the documentation and history from previous Games.

Ticketing was a clear example of this, and it is one that I brought out in my amendment. We wanted hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren to have the opportunity to come to the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games and not pay a penny for their tickets, but we were also fundamentally committed to the value of the Games, the sports and the event. So we had a key principle: no free tickets. That is completely the way to structure these things. You do not drive engagement, fans and greater inclusion by thinking that you just need to give away free tickets. The way to structure it is to have tickets available to schoolchildren, as was the case in London 2012.

My amendment is broader. It would make tickets available to local organisations, to disabled people and to other groups—the list is not exhaustive—and have the face-value price of those tickets paid out of a portion of the most expensive tickets for those events. It worked effectively and inclusively at London 2012, and those people who were paying for the highest-priced tickets were delighted that part of what they were paying for was to enable hundreds of thousands of young people to come and experience Olympic and Paralympic sport, often for the first time in their lives, and certainly for the first time in their lives at London 2012. Taking a principle developed there, it would make sense to thread an accessible ticketing duty into this Bill.

On the tickets themselves, as I say, this is currently an extraordinarily analogue Bill at a time when tickets have become extraordinarily complex, more enabling and potentially exclusive in digital token form on digital ledger technologies. We have the ability to do so much more with tickets. First, we can drive out fraud and touting through having the tickets in an immutable form. Secondly, we can attach whatever we choose to that ticket. Say that somebody has particular access needs, food allergies or whatever it might be—you can put that in as part of the digital token representation of their ticket. We can make the ticket so much more powerful, inclusive and connected to the event. It could potentially drive fan engagement: tokens, merch, exclusive benefits, interviews with the players or interviews with the competitors. Whatever you choose, that is all available with ticketing technology that exists today, yet the Bill is silent on this.

If only to take away the uncertainty for all those organisations involved with digital assets and token representations of tickets, I believe that there should be clarity on the face of the Bill as to the nature, acceptability, use and function of digital tokens as ticket representations. Just imagine the role that that could play in terms of driving out touting: you would have a real-time digital record of the whole thing and the history of that token. Touting would be impossible without it being clearly visible, thus creating the opportunity to do something about it and to do something about it through smart contract technology, not even necessarily involving human Intervention to catch that moment.

Finally, I think we need AI monitoring across this whole area. We have come a long way since the days when your man in the sheepskin jacket approached with a bunch of tickets for whatever sport or music event he might be trying to pile on to you. So much of this is an online experience—or an online exclusion, because the tickets disappear before even the fastest human hand can get anywhere near them. All this activity is entirely able to be captured in real time by effective AI monitoring systems, setting the technology to solve for the technologies; and yet the Bill says nothing as to this opportunity. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

My Lords, I tried to add my name to Amendment 27, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, but I was slightly too late for the printing of the Marshalled List. I think there is something important in this amendment in terms of thinking about who is able to have access to major games.

If you look at the 2012 programme, there was a massive commitment right from the start to no free tickets—the sponsors paid for them. It was not just the joy on the children’s faces when they got to go and experience the events, but it was something that they will remember for the rest of their lives. It was also tied into the school programmes that were being run at the same time. As I have said before, 2012 was also the only time that I have ever been able to go and watch a sporting event where I was able to sit with more than one member of my family. With the ticketing, if someone could not sit in a high stand or needed to be at the end of a row, they also thought about how they linked that up to accessible toilets; those are all really important things. I think Wembley Stadium is the only place I have ever visited that actually understood some of those issues as well. I think there are 147 accessible toilets at Wembley Stadium, which other venues should definitely aspire to. Other things that you could do include “Pay your age”, which 2012 did really well.

As a spectator who is a disabled person—the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, mentioned smarter ticketing—you are constantly having to explain what you need, where you want to sit and who you want to sit with or check whether you actually have a guaranteed accessible seat. Again, it is about showing the world what we do and what we care about. We should be looking at ticket touting wider than this, because it is an issue not just for the events that this Bill may cover.

Another issue in this group of amendments, which I also mentioned in my meeting with the noble Baroness the Minister, relates to thinking about disabled people not just as spectators. I was commentating on a major event in a new-build venue, and it turned out that the commentator’s position was not wheelchair accessible, so I was not able to do my job properly. I spent half the time commentating in a completely different position. As a commentator, it helps if you can have some interaction with the other people that you are commentating with, so we had to move to a venue quite a considerable distance away to be able to do the last event that I was commentating on. There should be something in here about a guarantee of what accessibility means—perhaps not necessarily on the face of the Bill but just an understanding that we can do so much better. If we are going to be building new venues, whether it is for the Olympics, the Paralympics or more football clubs, we should make sure that disabled people have the ability to access events in a fair and equitable way.

I support the other amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. He has more experience on this than anyone else in the Chamber from his work at LOCOG and beyond, and we should be listening to the things that he is asking for.

My Lords, I have four amendments in this group, but the main thing about the amendments on ticket touting is that everybody agrees that something should be done. There is one principal disagreement going on here. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, is basically saying, “Do not do it here; do it properly somewhere else” and lots of the rest of us are saying, “No, do it here, get it done and carry it on”. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, agreed with that. From my Benches, we tried to get an Amendment down that included this and we did not actually hit the target; we were told that we were out of scope of the Bill, so I salute his drafting—I take it that it is his; if it is not, he can just take the compliment.

However, when we go through this, we have got a lot of other issues here, such as disability accessibility. I do not know how many dozen times I have discussed that, and we still do not have it right. I hope the Minister will be able to say something reassuring about an ongoing process for that.

Just to refer back to my amendments, I said to myself, “Oh yes, that was it—National Trading Standards, yes, good idea, I thought I had an original point there, but the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, used it in his first sentence”. We have something here that says, “It isn’t working. Can we know what will be done?” The small series of options that we have in this Bill is actually managing to annoy people, oddly, because they are not big enough and they are not going far enough, and we do not have anything else that is immediately coming. We have a pocket of legislation around this Bill, which we have not seen even in draft, and that is one of the problems here. I hope that the Minister can start a process that could be finished by Report, when we get an idea of what we are going to get on ticket touting and where it is going to come in, if we are not going to do it here—and this would have been an opportunity to bring in everything under this Bill, so we had something that would actually work.

There are some other smaller amendments. A charity auction for a ticket is not ticket touting—yes, I would hope that that would be the case. But to have some clarity around some of the issues that we have raised, is the maximum penalty enough? One of the amendments in my name suggests

“leave out ‘£20,000’ and insert ‘an amount not exceeding 10% of the person’s annual global turnover’”.

Some of these organisations are so big that £20,000 would basically be the cost of doing business.

Could we have an idea of the whole picture? At the moment, the Government by doing a nice thing in this Bill are annoying everyone, oddly. I do not envy the Minister in her response. The Government may well have good intentions, but the old cliché that this might well be the thing that paves the road to hell might well be true with this.

I thank my noble friend Lord Moynihan for introducing this group and thank noble Lords for their contributions. This whole debate shows that it is a complicated area and begs the question whether this is the right Bill for it to be in. At the very least, we need another Bill very quickly to cover all the complications that it brought up and apply it to music and cultural events as well as those brought up here.

The point about FIFA was a very good example, with the US World Cup. It shows how difficult it is to try to create a catch-all Bill when we know how fast the environment is moving, and that FIFA might change its rules, as it has done for this World Cup—let alone when you come to some of the technological advances that my noble friend Lord Holmes brings up, and trying to cater for those today in a Bill when we know just how quickly AI and other technological advances are going.

My own amendments are modest in nature, in terms of trying to enable the charitable resale of tickets. At the same time, I think that they introduce an interesting conundrum. If we are saying that we are very happy for a charity auction to get a good price—and generally we want it to get as good a price as possible—we are saying that we do not mind profiteering in principle as long as it is for a good cause. Again, that brings some interesting complications into this matter.

On our amendments around a genuine resale market, as our Amendment tries to show and as that of my noble friend Lord Fuller tries to show, there are genuine and legitimate reasons to want to resell your ticket, and the legitimate platforms have a good role there. It should be legitimate that they charge a reasonable service fee—I think that the 10% mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is probably a reasonable indicator there. But there is a proper function that they can play, and we would much rather that they played those roles rather than driving it under cover to the ticket touts, where you can get the real price gouging, for want of a better word.

Probably what this debate shows, like many of the others tonight, is that it is a very complicated area. To try to get it all into one catch-all Bill becomes more and more complicated. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government are going to cater for this issue and for many of the others.

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Holmes of Richmond, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, Lord Markham and Lord Addington, and my noble friends Lord Bassam of Brighton, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Lady Keeley for their amendments. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for giving notice of his intention to oppose the question that Clause 5 stand part of the Bill. I count myself as among those who were slightly surprised at this, but I appreciate having heard the noble Lord that this is because of his consistent Opposition to the many ills associated with the secondary ticket market. However, I do not accept that it is not appropriate for these measures to be in the Bill—but I shall go on to that later.

Amendments 27 and 89 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, would require the Secretary of State to introduce an accessible ticketing quota in regulations, and that related information must be included in a register held by authorised ticket sellers. We are determined that when the UK hosts major events, we lead by example in ensuring they are inclusive and accessible to the widest possible audience. That is why we have worked with UEFA on its approach for Euro 2028, which seeks to put fans first with transparent and accessible ticketing principles. It was interesting to hear the examples given by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, on accessible ticketing. Noble Lords may be aware of another example, which is in my speaking notes, of UEFA’s track record in this regard for Euro 2024. UEFA partnered with the Kaizen Foundation in Germany for the 10,000 Smiles project, which provided free tickets through sponsorship to children in host cities from underprivileged backgrounds and for children and adults with disabilities up to 21 years old.

Amendment 28, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay and Lord Markham, introduces an exception to the ticket touting offence for a person selling an event ticket as part of an auction provided that the proceeds go to charity. While I recognise the spirit, the framework approach calls for proportionality to be reconciled with the requirements of event owners and the guarantees provided by Governments. We will do this through introducing appropriate exceptions to the ticket touting offence in regulations on a case-by-case basis. It may not be appropriate to do so where an event has an official charity partner with an exclusive right to raise proceeds through the auction of event tickets. Where this is the case, charities looking to raise money for themselves would be able to apply for authorisation to auction tickets. This request would be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Amendment 28A, tabled by my noble friends Lord Bassam of Brighton, Lady Keeley and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, would require a review of the impact and effectiveness of the ticket touting provisions within 12 months of Royal Assent. The first use of these provisions will be for Euro 2028, with tickets expected to go on sale after the final tournament draw in December 2027. We are committed to an evaluation of the application of provisions in the Bill within 12 to 18 months of Euro 2028. We therefore do not believe that this amendment is workable or necessary.

Amendment 29, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Parkinson and Lord Markham, would introduce a defence to the ticket touting offence mirroring that included under the Birmingham Commonwealth Games Act 2020. The difference is that the offence in that Act did not criminalise the resale of tickets where carried out at face value and not in the course of business. That meant that a person advertising a ticket on behalf of someone else had to determine whether or not the ticket was being sold above face value to avoid being found guilty of the offence. This consideration is redundant under this Bill, which applies to all activity that is carried out in a public place, including on an online platform.

Amendments 30 and 32, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, seek to further define what is meant by an “unauthorised ticketing activity”. The Majority of activity this amendment seeks to regulate is already prohibited under the offence. The definition of touting in the Bill is intentionally broad. It includes where a person carries out an unauthorised ticketing activity in a public place, in the course of business, or with a view to any person making a profit. Major sporting event owners require strict controls over the resale of tickets. That is why the ticket touting offence in the Bill permits public resale only where it has been authorised by the event owner or organiser. In reality, we expect that major sporting event owners will put in place an official resale platform for such tickets. The amendments also introduce provisions on surge pricing. Businesses are already required by law to give fans clear and accurate price information before purchase, free from undue pressure or other manipulative tactics that could influence their decision.

Amendment 31, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, seeks to exempt anyone buying six or fewer tickets for an event in a single transaction. This amendment would create a significant loophole in the ticket touting offence. A person could buy six tickets at a time and resell without limitation, potentially making significant profits from events funded in part by the taxpayer. These events should be affordable and accessible to all. Enabling people to buy up significant numbers of tickets with the intention to sell these at a significantly increased value would undermine this objective. The Bill does not ban the transfer or sale of legitimately purchased tickets to friends or family. It may, however, in my view, be the so-called jilted girlfriend who gets to go.

Amendment 33, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay and Lord Markham, would require any person authorised to carry out ticketing activities to establish a mechanism through which tickets can be transferred or sold to another person. The Bill does not, as I have already stated, prohibit the private transfer of tickets between friends and family where this is carried out at face value, and we expect event organisers to put in place mechanisms to facilitate this. We expect, and would seek assurances up front, that an official resale platform would be made available so that people can legally resell tickets.

Amendments 34 and 35, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, seek to create a power to specify in regulations technical standards for distributed ledger ticketing records. We share the noble Lord’s objective to ensure that the sale and distribution of electronic tickets for major sporting events are safe and secure. Indeed, that is why we are putting in place a criminal offence for the unauthorised sale and resale of tickets. However, it is up to event organisers to decide what systems and processes they put in place for their ticketing operations, and to ensure that these meet any relevant legal requirements and technical standards.

The noble Lord’s Amendment 64 would require guidance published on ticketing to include provisions related to AI-assisted enforcement and evidential standards for enforcement in the digital environment. We recognise that companies are continually investing in technology to ensure that tickets reach genuine fans. In particular, we fully support advances in technological solutions that disrupt criminal activity online. However, it is not for the Government to prescribe technical standards for the use of technology in a piecemeal way.

Amendment 36, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, would enable the maximum level of financial penalty imposed directly for breach of the ticket touting offence to be no more than 10% of the person’s annual global turnover. Enforcement authorities, including local weights and measures authorities in Great Britain, can impose a financial penalty as an alternative to prosecution and have discretion to determine the level of financial penalty up to £20,000. This enables local authorities to impose penalties without having to go through the courts.

The Bill also enables local weights and measures authorities and the Competition and Markets Authority to use the enforcement powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. This already allows the Competition and Markets Authority to directly levy fines of up to 10% of global turnover where the collective interests of consumers have been harmed.

Amendment 62, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, would remove the ability of the Competition and Markets Authority to enforce a ticket touting offence in the Bill and would instead confer enforcement powers on National Trading Standards. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, also made this point. I am not aware of any examples of National Trading Standards being provided with powers to directly enforce offences beyond those available to local trading standards authorities, which receive funding for priority projects from National Trading Standards. In fact, I think the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, made a point about power going to the Competition and Markets Authority, not National Trading Standards.

As I hope I have already made clear, local trading standards authorities are empowered under this Bill to take decisive action without having to rely on the Competition and Markets Authority or the courts. This complements the Competition and Markets Authority’s enhanced enforcement powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which focuses on interventions with high-impact results, such as changing market behaviour or deterring those who might otherwise breach the law.

To answer the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, on whether Clause 5 should stand part of the Bill, we believe that Clause 5 is integral to the framework provisions within this Bill, and to delivering the requirements of major sporting event owners in relation to ticketing. The clause is designed to ensure that the period over which the ticketing provisions apply can be tailored to the requirements of different events. It does not prescribe a maximum period that the ticket touting offence can apply, as this will vary between events to ensure that the period for which the offence is enforced is proportionate to the particular sporting event. The clause also requires regulations to specify the part or parts of the United Kingdom to which the provisions apply.

I appreciated the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, making it really clear that his opposition to the measures in the Bill was related to a desire for wider ticketing reforms. In response, I say that I think we are in agreement that this Bill is not an appropriate vehicle for wider ticketing reforms. The noble Lord is right that the time limit provisions in the Bill apply only to major sporting events that meet the necessary conditions and are specifically designed to enable public resale only where it has been authorised by the event owner. However, any delay to this Bill by including significant additional provisions outside the current scope puts at risk our ability to deliver commitments made to UEFA for Euro 2028. Pre-legislative scrutiny of the wider secondary ticketing reforms will ensure we take into account the views of experts in the live events sector, helping to deliver legislation that is enforceable, effective and future-proof.

On the point made by the noble Lord related to StubHub, I was not aware of the comments, but I have a brief response from the department. It says that the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, raised a departmental meeting with StubHub and the department met with stakeholders from all areas of the live events sector, including StubHub and Viagogo in order to understand the full ticketing landscape. However, the department is clear that these meetings did not impact the decision to publish the Bill in draft in this Session, and it is committed to doing that.

Before I conclude, I am keen to touch on the Government’s wider position of the touting of tickets, which has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords. As noble Lords are aware, we have committed to bring forward a resale price cap, including a cap on the level of service fee that can be charged and limits on the number of tickets individuals can resell. We are fully committed to introducing these measures. Work to prepare this legislation is happening at pace, but we need to get it right; that is why we intend to publish the Bill in draft in this Session.

Recognising the interest in these matters, I commit to hosting an all-Peers session on this matter in the coming weeks, with relevant officials, so noble Lords can get clarity on where we are and where we are planning to go. I will endeavour to do this before the Summer Recess. In the meantime, I respectfully ask all noble Lords not to press their amendments and to be content for this clause to stand part of the Bill.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her quite extensive, albeit rapid-fire response. Many of us will read it in greater detail and come back with any questions after we have had that opportunity. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, that, while we might have disagreed on my recommendation that we oppose Clause 5 becoming part of the Bill, he at least recognises that it is effectively a probing Amendment. The reason I put it down in those terms was that there were many good amendments that were already tabled on this subject. I wanted to highlight a really important point: by simply placing it on the face of this Bill, given the Government’s commitments, we lacked consistency across the country.

That is my point exactly, and that is why this is an important debate to have had this evening. I congratulate the noble Lord on his observations and comments.

I am grateful for that Intervention: I echo everything he said: everything he said, in terms of detail, is to be supported.

The second point is this: we have to be incredibly careful, in discussing this subject, about the autonomy of world sport. We are looking at major sporting events and we are seeking to encourage UEFA, FIFA or the IOC to award the right to host those events in this country. We are not telling UEFA, the IOC or FIFA what to do; that is not the way world sport works. I hear in the response from the Minister, “We expect them to do this”, “We expect them to do that” and “We expect them to do otherwise”. We can expect as much as we want: it is UEFA, or the event organiser, that decides.

What I was pleased to hear, in that context, was that this is clearly drafted with the agreement of UEFA for the Euros 2028, in the same way that there was unique legislation introduced for London 2012 to reflect what the IOC wanted. That is why the contribution from my noble friend Lord Holmes was so valid. The IOC listened carefully to what LOCOG—the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games—had discussed in great detail. They had discussed the need to criminalise the secondary market from selling tickets, to criminalise touting, so they could totally control the ticketing operation for London 2012, which they did highly successfully, not least because it allowed them to make tickets available to schools as my noble friend Lord Holmes said. They looked holistically at the overall ticketing for that event, unlike FIFA for the World Cup in the United States at the present time.

It is incredibly important to recognise that, when we are talking about appropriate arrangements for ticketing in the Bill, we are talking about sitting down and listening to what the organisers of these major international events want, in association with the organising committee, and putting in place appropriate legislation for that. It would be very different if we hosted the Olympic Games in the future. We would need to come back with event-specific legislation—a point I keep making. It can be easily remedied on the face of the Bill, and all these issues could be put to one side if the Government recognised that, in addition to this framework, they will require, possibly, event-specific legislation to host major international events here—as I desperately hope they will—in the future.

My concern was that we are being tough on touting on the face of this Bill for a small number of events that the Bill relates to. We may have found a way, in government, to talk tough and do nothing for the vast Majority of people who are really concerned in this country about the abuse of the secondary market, and about the need for the Government to legislate. To bring forward a draft Bill, having said they were definitely going to legislate, with no commitment to implement legislation in a future session of this Parliament is not what the arts world, the music world, the sporting world, and the likes of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, and myself—

I would not normally intervene. However, I was clear that we are going to introduce a draft Bill and will introduce legislation in due course, so I feel the noble Lord is going slightly beyond my response. I am happy to sit down and talk to any noble Lord about the ticket touting measures coming up, but I cannot accept that we are not taking it seriously, as the noble Lord suggests.

That is an extremely important and welcome Intervention, but the Minister said “in due course”. Can she commit that that means during this Parliament?

I cannot commit to a timescale, but I have offered to have a meeting where we can discuss that in further detail.

To fail to commit for the whole of this Parliament, when we have years to run, is disappointing, given the strength of the comments made by the Prime Minister and other Ministers in recent months. It is vital that the Government indicate by the time we get to Report whether they will legislate during this Parliament.

The public have longed to get legislation on to the statute book to protect people from being ripped off and turning up at many concerts, having paid a lot of money to bring their kids down from wherever they live, to find out that they have a forged ticket. That must be stopped. We must have tough legislation. That is why I share with the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, the need to legislate on this and why we were so pleased that the Government were willing to come forward with legislation that Parliament could consider. To know that this might not happen in the current Parliament would be deeply disappointing.

My noble friend emphasises the importance of tackling touts in a broad piece of legislation that does not cover just these events. Could he also emphasise, as my noble friend Lord Fuller raised, ensuring the obligation of those selling the tickets to maximise the controls to avoid touting?

I absolutely endorse that comment. As my noble friend, who has sat with me on this subject many times over the past five years, will know, ever since the Waterson report and many others, I have sought to table and introduce legislation—sometimes successfully—to give far greater clarity and visibility on tickets and to make sure that when people sell tickets, they follow the conditions that the organiser of the event has brought forward. If the organiser has set the condition that it should not be sold on the secondary market, it should not be. We have needed legislation to be introduced in order to achieve that.

I am absolutely tough on this subject, as the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, knows. I have the privilege of co-chairing the All-Party Group on Ticket Abuse. We have to take action on this. I really hope that, following the Minister’s response, she will be able to go away and consider before Report an absolute commitment that this Government will honour their word and introduce legislation not during this Session but during this Parliament.

Clause 5 agreed.

Clause 6: Persons granting ticketing authorisations

Amendment 27 not moved.

Clause 6 agreed.

Clause 7: Exceptions to the ticket touting offence

Amendment 28 not moved.

Clause 7 agreed.

Amendment 28A not moved.

Schedule 1: Ticket touting provisions

Amendments 29 to 36 not moved.

Schedule 1 agreed.

Clause 8: Advertising regulations

Amendment 37 not moved.

Clause 8 agreed.

Clause 9: Persons granting advertising authorisations