Ticket Price Regulation: Live Events

I want to flashback to the summer of 2024: Labour back in power, and echoes of ’90s Britpop with an Oasis reunion. Alas, the latter is only remembered now for the ticket price rip-off that happened, with endless online queues and ever-inflating ticket prices during the transaction process. And then there was our pioneering manifesto commitment to stamp it out. But two years on, legislation has not yet hit the statute book. One top manager has told me: “I was really encouraged by the Government’s public commitment to stop profiteering on the resale market, though my optimism has definitely taken a hit over the stalling and prevarication.” I am just pointing this out to the Minister today. We know that our Prime Minister is a music fan, and that he is unafraid to act where needed—for example, yesterday, on Palestine—so I say to the Minister, let us get rid of this issue once and for all. I have my Sale of Tickets (Sporting and Cultural Events) Bill readymade to do the job. Our live music industry is part of a sector that is worth £8 billion to the national coffers every year. We are the second biggest exporter of recorded music, which is soft power, but touts are costing the UK—

We know that the UK music industry is a major player in our national economy, but £145 million a year is being lost to touts in a cost of living crisis. These touts are not the old-fashioned man in a flasher mac with tickets in his pockets, saying, “Oi, do you want a ticket?” Online bots are now touting in a sophisticated way. As Lord Brennan—the artist formerly known as Kevin—says so wisely in his fan-led review: “everyone’s life is enriched when they gather with others to enjoy live music.” It should not be unobtainable or out of reach because of profiteering by the opportunistic. There are two issues here: rip-off resale and dynamic pricing. With rip-off resale, minutes after gigs sell out, resale tickets appear on sale online for thousands of pounds. All arts ought to be accessible to everyone, so that real fans can get tickets—tickets should not be being hoovered up by these bots.

Does my hon. Friend agree that community-owned venues are better protected against that kind of touting? If live music belonged to the people who watched it and used it, that would be the way to protect it most—through community and co-operative ownership.

My hon. Friend makes a brilliant point: the mutualisation of our venues is an important thing. We now have a Prime Minister who is a Labour and Co-op MP, so we hope to see that in practice. I will come to the example of the Co-op Live arena, but I think we will not have certainty until we have proper legislation to get rid of this issue once and for all.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate; I am always encouraged by her energy and enthusiasm for the subject matters that she brings forward. Is she aware of action taken against the company Starhub in 2024, following concerns that customers were initially shown artificially low headline prices, only for mandatory fees to be added later in the purchasing process? That meant that 50,000 UK customers were eligible for refunds. However, delaying the disclosure of unavoidable fees can exploit customers’ inattention. Given that transparency is key—and I think that is what she is seeking—does the hon. Lady agree that current protections should be made sufficient to ensure that customers are shown the full and accurate price of a ticket before committing themselves to a purchase?

I certainly agree with that, and one of the provisions in my excellent Bill is on transparency. People should know what they are getting into. Touting does not just apply to music. Football, theatre, and all sorts of other things are becoming subject to these processes. In July, Which? found that tickets for Lewis Capaldi’s current run at the O2 in London were on resale sites for £1,400, when they were originally priced between £32 and £111. A ticket for the All Points East festival with Raye was even on sale for £114,666 on viagogo—the original price was only meant to be £80. We are used to such surge, gouge and dynamic pricing—where there is variability and prices fluctuate—with planes, trains, Uber and Amazon, but it is creeping into all our lives. It is made easier with data mining, because that algorithmic calculation can factor in demand, willingness to pay and availability. Oasis clam that it was not surge pricing with them, but tiered pricing: there were different levels of ticket, which is why, by the time people were at the front of the queue, the £100 tickets had gone, and the tickets remaining cost £300. The array of different ticket types—premium; standing—can be a bit confusing.

My hon. Friend is making a typically entertaining and informative speech. I wonder whether she would agree that, from the customer’s point of view, there does not appear to be that much difference between tiered pricing and dynamic pricing—it is just that when the cheap seats have gone, they have to pay the premium. There is something unedifying, at best, about the whole concept of tiered pricing. Is that something that she thinks the Government should be looking at when they bring forward the Bill?

If there were transparency—if people were getting a sort of fan package and their dinner was involved as well, and there were other extras on top—we could perhaps understand why, but this mysterious tiered pricing, when there is no difference between the two, other than one is called premium and one is not, is quite baffling. My Bill would ensure real-time information on the ticketing site all the way through the process, setting out the amount of tickets at each price, so that fans do not get a nasty surprise when they get to the front of the queue.

My hon. Friend is touching on something really important, because the other part of the issue is the length of time that people have to sit in front of a screen in order to get to the front of the queue. That is fine for people who can afford to take a day off work or who are flexible in their work, meaning they can sit and do that, but it is not fine for those who work shifts or who work a job that takes them out of their home. There is a structural barrier to lower-paid people, mainly from working-class communities, accessing the theatre, the arts and sports—the kind of enrichment we are all saying they should have. I wonder whether my hon. Friend might look at remedying that as part of her Bill.

My hon. Friend is so right. We have seen that happening with venues such as the Royal Opera House and the ballet, which are perceived as elitist, correctly or incorrectly, and we do not want to make an elitist system more elitist. The systems benefit people who have the luxury of spending time refreshing their screen all day. My hon. Friend’s remark reminded me that I found an article in The Times from January 2025, which says that touts are “loathed as parasitic…but…they provide a valuable service”, sorting “the hassle and risk of finding new buyers” and reselling tickets. What?! I think that there is an important bit missing from that sentence—“at a vastly inflated mark-up price”. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. These practices do have their defenders. When I was trying to get signatures for my Bill, there was resistance from some Tories, with some saying—“Some Might Say”—that this is the free market and that we cannot have interference in all parts of our lives, yet our constituents want this change. They deserve transparency. They should not be at the mercy of predatory touts who exploit fan loyalty to sell off tickets secondarily at an astronomical mark-up, shutting out the masses, as everyone has said, from accessing cultural events that enrich us all. I have also said in my Bill that there should be a maximum price cap and that tickets should have the price printed on them as early as possible. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) said, after the adrenalin rush of the virtual queue, there is pressure when reaching the front to snap up what is left, if someone has had the time to get there, which leaves some fans with buyer’s remorse afterwards—“How much? How many thousands did I just pay?” But by then it is too late. In a different article in The Times, the same writer says: “While I might struggle to justify paying thousands to watch England play” —this article was about the world cup— “the truth is that others are willing to pay.” It is the “harsh reality” of the market, but it does not need to be like that. I found an interview with Robert Smith where he said that his longevity is due to the fact that he prices things affordably. He wants people to come back; he wants people to wear the T-shirt. He still makes a profit, but it does not have to be at the maximum price point that the market allows. With Viagogo and StubHub, however, “There’s no limit” in terms of multiples. Children were left in tears recently at the Co-op Live arena in Manchester. They wanted to see the girl group KATSEYE, but, when the real tickets sold out within seconds, their parents were forced on to another one of those horrible sites, Hellotickets, paying £568 for four tickets, only for their kids to get to the venue and find out it was for over-16s only. There was notification of that, and no recourse. It is awful. Not all resellers are baddies. Twickets is an ethical resale site. The Royal Albert Hall, the Roundhouse, LW Theatres, Ed Sheeran and Adele all use it as a partner. It allows tickets to be sold only at or below the original face-value price; it actually prohibits any increase. Every listing is checked manually to ensure that there is a real ticket behind it. It might not necessarily be a case of doing that. A maximum multiple or percentage could be put in, because there might be a genuine reason—not being able to make the date, for example—for having to resell the ticket. The other one that caught my eye was the Tickets For Good app from Sheffield, which has distributed 1.4 million surplus unsold music, theatre, comedy and sport tickets. It donates or heavily discounts the tickets for key workers and individuals on low incomes. As all hon. Members have said, things like that open up live arts and opportunities, because let us not forget that for many even the face-value price is a stretch. Music is so important for wellbeing, social connection and all those things. I have to say, I remember when tickets were not so expensive. The first ones I bought were for Blur at the time of “Modern Life Is Rubbish”. I bought a pair of them for £8 each from the Kentish Town Forum. I went to a window and a lady—I think the cleaner—said, “I’ll have to get the right person”. When they came along, I handed over the cash and got the change. I have not done a calculation factoring in current inflation for those tickets, but I have done for some tickets bought by my constituent Ros Cowan. In 1984 she saw The Smiths at the Hammersmith Palais in my borough—I have actually seen Rick Astley and Bros in the same venue—and the price was £3.50. She said that in those days a student like her could go and have a few drinks at the bar and afford to get home. Factoring in the Bank of England’s multiple of inflation, that makes £12 in today’s money, so these things have gone up. My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Withington (Jeff Smith) and I are the same age—or the same bracket, anyway—and remember when these things were not so expensive. The elasticity of demand, Madam Deputy Speaker—don’t you love it!

One thing that has changed over time is the fact that there is now so much emphasis on live performance for musicians to be able to make an income. Perhaps my hon. Friend agrees that we need to look closely at streaming services, because the market has become distorted so that there is such a great emphasis on making money through touring.

My hon. Friend is correct. The most accessed site is YouTube, and it gets not a penny from that. I am guilty of listening to music on YouTube as well, watching old Top of the Pops episodes from the ’80s, and Runaround—that was a good show—and Swap Shop and so on. Anyway, my hon. Friend is right; we need to remunerate. In fact, Scotland has just introduced a universal basic income for musicians, or they are talking about it at least, but anyway, we do not like that Scottish Government—boo! They are not even here today. Where are they? That’s them for you. Viagogo actually welcomed the delay of the legislation, and it is notorious for selling tickets that people buy only to find when they turn up to the venue that the tickets are fake. Viagogo did a briefing for MPs where it said that it is stopping piracy. That is just nonsense. Very sinisterly, the CEO Eric Baker at an on-stage event at JP Morgan boasted about how he has the Government’s ear. I hope that my good friend the Minister can put a dampener on that. He said that he has been five times to the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport between November and May and has the Government in the palm of his hand. He said that they are listening to him, that he is “educating” them on the complexities of the drawbacks. I ask the Government please not to listen to these people; we should listen to our constituents. Before the last election, The Guardian obtained footage of a secret meeting of touts somewhere near London Bridge. They were establishing a lobbying group and saying that they would “sabotage” the proposals. One of them is even seen from the stage saying, “Look we can all chip in and get a good lobbyist, because if this change happens we are f***ed.” Surely that is the point—we want to do those people over, because they have been screwing the public something chronic for ages. The power needs to be rebalanced towards the fans so that we can have arts for all, but these guys are continuing unperturbed and undisturbed. I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to be bold and stand up to the StubHubs, the Viagogos and all these nasty people. Zohran Mamdani had a campaign at the world cup called “Game over Greed”, because the tickets there were sky-high and dynamically priced. As a result, 1,000 $50 tickets were ringfenced for residents of New York’s boroughs. He even managed to negotiate free bus travel; in the Brennan review it says that transport is prohibited. I worry that we risk falling behind other advanced economies on this. The US Justice Department sued Live Nation—Ticketmaster’s parent company—which, after a lawsuit, had to pay up to $280 million in damages for a scandal a bit like the Oasis one, but for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Ireland has all but banned secondary ticketing since 2021. Australia has done so this year, and its ban covers resale, dynamic pricing and drip pricing, and there are fines of 100 million Australian dollars for offenders. Please scare them with something stiff like that, Minister! Those hidden fees—what are they for? It should not be the case that “If you go down to the web tonight, you’re sure of a nasty surprise,” but that is what is happening. As we speak, in Wembley, Bon Jovi are taking the stage. Yesterday, tickets were £80, but then there was this service charge fee of £17.06, making the whole thing £97.06. That 21.3% charge is a huge mark-up. It is not just Bon Jovi; for Niall Horan, Pulp and Jay-Z, the fee for processing, handling and administration is at around that 20% mark. Also, why are those fees per ticket, and not per transaction? We have just got rid of the hated two-child limit in recognition of families. These per-person things can add up. Sadly, this is happening with the Royal Opera House; and the National Theatre—it is publicly funded; it is not a charity—is now introducing an element of those fees and dynamic pricing. I long for the days when we could see the queue, and who was in front of us. There was some predictability there. I am not against dynamic or surge pricing per se. It is seen as exploitative, but it could mean that pricing goes down. I once saw Elvis Costello at Hyde Park for free; the headliner was meant to be Elton John, but he cancelled, which was good for me as I am not an Elton fan. People can understand demand factors—for example, the price at the pumps in Acton being affected by the strait of Hormuz—but when we do not know why these things are being done, it annoys us. In conclusion, we need to bear in mind ethical considerations; we need transparency; and we need certainty. I welcome the draft Bill in the King’s speech. I love the Minister’s article in the Daily Record, which says, “Time is up for touts”, but the Government seem to be taking their time introducing a Bill in Parliament. I say: hurry up and do it today. The Government have already fixed many things in the cost of living crisis. Will the Minister please confirm when this will happen? We have been told, “When parliamentary time allows”, but this would be an easy win. As I said, I have a ready-made Bill here that would do it; we could just make that law. Where there is a will, there is a way—we have acted on driving tests—and the Prime Minister is a music fan. We have had four Prime Ministers since the start of the Ukraine war, which is a tragic war, and he is the only one who has strummed a guitar with the troops. Let us do this. Let us not look back in anger; let us make it happen, Minister.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) for a very dramatic speech. She went through places where she has seen concerts; I do not know if she, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Withington (Jeff Smith), is hankering for her youth, and wishing she could go back there, but it was a tremendous speech, and I think we would agree with every word she said. My hon. Friend mentioned Bon Jovi. I would have been at that concert this evening as they took the stage, had I not been here answering her debate. It had particular relevance for me, because I am not new to this industry; I had my own business when I left university, and the very first thing that I organised was a Scotland-wide tour for a tribute band. Hon. Members will never guess which artist they were a tribute to; they were called Non Jovi. Those tickets were dynamically priced—the price would only ever go down, because nobody ever came to see them. Never mind; that is my hankering after the good old days. The UK live events sector is, as my hon. Friend said, a jewel in our national crown. From world-class sporting matches to unforgettable concerts—tonight we have heard about many that have not been forgotten—and plays, those events enrich our lives, strengthen community bonds and inspire future generations. Crucially, they provide us with stories that we can tell for years and years. They greatly benefit our economy, generating billions annually, and support a dynamic creative and sporting ecosystem. This Government understand that, and we have put the creative industries front and centre of our modern industrial strategy; we are committing to boosting investment in the sector from £17 billion to £31 billion by 2035. For too long, however, as highlighted by Lord Brennan of Canton’s report following the independent fan-led music review, the joy of attending live events has been marred by unfair practices in the ticketing market, most notably the systematic activities of ticket touts, which we heard about from my hon. Friend. They crowd out fans from the primary market and resell at extortionate prices. Ticket touts—this is a remarkable figure—take £400,000 a day from fans’ pockets; that is nearly £150 million a year. That is money that should be going into the industry. The Government are committed to tackling industrial-scale touting once and for all, improving transparency around pricing practices, and putting money in fans’ pockets. As my hon. Friend has demonstrated, far too often, fans are crowded out of the primary market by touts, who are only interested in making a quick and exorbitant profit at fans’ expense. The Government have been clear: this has to stop. My hon. Friend is correct: as I said in the Daily Record, the touts’ time is up. We want to improve transparency, consumer protection and fans’ access to live events. We also want to make sure that they have a safe and secure means of selling, reselling or transferring their tickets, and to ensure that money flows back into the live events sector and fans’ pockets. That is why we committed in our manifesto and our recently published plan for music to introducing new consumer protections for live event ticket resale, and it is why my Department, alongside the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, undertook a consultation last year on the best ways of tackling this, as well as issuing a call for evidence on pricing practices across the wider sector. We received over 500 responses from right across the live events sector. There were some clear themes for us to address, and those themes have been highlighted this evening. First, genuine fans should be able to recoup the costs of their ticket when no longer able to attend. Enforcement needs to be effective if our measures are to have impact. Secondary platforms need to play their part in ensuring that new rules are implemented and complied with, and that primary and secondary platforms are part of the same ticketing ecosystem. The former could do more to protect their sales and, where appropriate, share information more seamlessly with resale platforms. As a result, we are taking action. Last November, we announced a robust package of measures to tackle exploitative touting, including a resale price cap, a separate service fee cap, limits on the number of tickets that can be resold, and obligations on platforms, all reinforced by the Competition and Markets Authority’s new powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. In the King’s Speech briefing earlier this year, we announced that the Government will publish a draft ticket tout ban Bill in this Session for pre-legislative scrutiny by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, of which my hon. Friend is a member. I look forward to working with my hon. Friend and the Committee through that process. Following pre-legislative scrutiny, the Government will introduce the Bill when parliamentary time allows and, as the Secretary of State said in Parliament last week—[Interruption.] We are coming to it. As the Secretary of State said last week, the Prime Minister is particularly passionate about this issue, and we will give the legislation the priority that it deserves and needs. We all want to see this on the statute book as soon as possible.

I am sorry that the Minister missed Bon Jovi because of me. I wonder whether there is any indication of when this will happen, because with all the things that a draft Bill brings—all the hoops of more consultation—it will take until 2028 now. I just feel that every day people are being ripped off. We have just missed another summer festival season. Can the Minister give us a time?

As I replied to my hon. Friend at the Select Committee meeting I attended last week, there were 39 Bills in the first Session of this new Government—39 very important Bills—that took us nearly two years to get through. In this Session, through the King’s Speech, we have of course introduced a number of Bills, and this one is a draft Bill. I can only reassure my hon. Friend and the House that we want to get this done as quickly as possible. That means we need to find the parliamentary time, once the draft Bill has been prepared and is ready, which should be imminently—not too many sleeps left; it depends on how many days we want to sleep for. We will then have a draft Bill that we can take forward, but there is a commitment from my Department and the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade to getting this done as quickly as possible. My hon. Friend had her private Member’s Bill, which she is waving around, on this topic in the last parliamentary Session. I share her concern for fans. It is worth noting that her Bill was drafted before the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which imposes new requirements around price transparency, came into effect in April last year. Our legislation will be focused on ending the scourge of touting, thereby improving access to live events. Tackling touting, and ensuring that fans are at the heart of live events, cannot be done by Government alone, of course; industry needs to play its part. It is industry-led action, innovation and best practice, alongside the Government’s new measures, that will truly transform the fan experience. The Government recognise that many ticketing platforms, event organisers and venues have devoted a lot of time, energy and resources to this issue in recent years. We know that significant money has been spent combating ticket fraud, touts and bot use, as well as educating fans on what to look out for when they are buying tickets online, all to ensure that buying tickets is as safe and seamless for fans as possible. Nevertheless, the strength of feeling from respondents to our consultation and the call for evidence was clear. In fact, they share our strength of feeling about the touting issue. Industry must build on existing guidance to do more to tackle exploitative practices. This is why we strongly welcome the commitment by the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers—STAR for short—to convene the sector. It will establish new best practice that ensures that pricing information is clear and up front, and that fans are empowered to make informed purchasing decisions, free from undue pressure. This work is already under way; I attended the inaugural meeting in March this year. The work is organised under four headings, to address some of the key issues in the ticketing sector. First, it will look at pricing transparency. Secondly, the industry will look at how the primary market can continue to be healthy. Thirdly, another workstream will look at accessibility issues. Finally, the industry will look at consumer education. Let us have a look at dynamic pricing. We know this is a subject that many people are concerned about. Businesses should feel free to use whatever pricing strategy meets their needs, but they must comply with the law. Where it appears that this is not happening, the CMA has the powers to enforce that and act upon it, and when businesses fall short of what is expected of them under the law, the CMA has powerful enforcement tools to ensure that businesses can be penalised and brought into line. Drip pricing is another one that my hon. Friend mentioned. It is not right when fans are shown a price for a product, only to find that it has increased by mandatory charges that are added as the transaction proceeds, particularly if they have been waiting all day on a screen to get to the front of the queue to buy tickets. I do not know if my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) has sat in his parliamentary office doing that at any point, but it is a real problem. In June this year, the Competition and Markets Authority fined StubHub International close to £900,000 and ordered it to issue refunds exceeding £590,000 to 50,000 fans for using this illegal practice. The CMA is also investigating Viagogo for similar practices. Lastly, on a related point, I continue to encourage the industry to adopt the voluntary £1 ticket levy for live events to support our grassroots music and grassroots music venues. The industry is doing the levy, but is it doing enough? Is a big question mark, and we just keep encouraging it to do as much as it possibly can. I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate on such an important issue, which affects the dedicated fans who sustain our live events sector. I would like to reassure the House that this Government are tackling industrial-scale ticket touting with urgency and will bring forth the legislation to ensure that fans are not priced out of major cultural and sporting events. That is a priority for this Government, and we will do that. I look forward to returning to this House with the draft Bill for pre-legislative scrutiny, and I welcome further engagement with my hon. Friend, and many other hon. Friends who have a deep interest in this issue, to help tackle ticket touting once and for all. Question put and agreed to.