Touts and re-selling tickets for profit to be made illegal by UK government

Re-selling tickets to live events for a profit is reportedly set to be banned by the UK government.

Ministers are expected to announce the plan as early as tomorrow (Wednesday November 19), in a bid to tackle touts and re-sale sites which offer tickets at several times’ face value.

Initially, the government had considered allowing touts and ordinary consumers to sell on a ticket for up to 30 per cent above the original face value, but new plans will see re-selling a ticket at anything more than the price at which it was originally bought being banned, as  The Guardian reports.

Restricting ticket touts was one of the Labour government’s election pledges, and in January, they announced that they would impose a price cap on how much touts can re-sell tickets for, as well as an official consultation into the industry and controversial ‘dynamic pricing’ practices.

This included a limit on how much companies, sites and individuals can sell secondary tickets to live events, concerts, theatre shows and sports.

The aforementioned consultation ran from January 10 until April 4. However, as of last week, these changes had yet to be implemented.

In response, artists such as Radiohead, Sam Fender, Dua Lipa, Coldplay, The Cure‘s Robert Smith, Iron Maiden, PJ Harvey, New Order and Mark Knopfler issued a statement, publicly calling on the government to keep the pledge they made.

Teaming up with organisations such as Which?, FanFair Alliance, O2 and the Football Supporters’ Association, they said in a statement that the previously promised protections are necessary to “help fix elements of the extortionate and pernicious secondary ticketing market that serve the interests of touts, whose exploitative practices are preventing genuine fans from accessing the music, theatre and sports they love.”

Investigations by Trading Standards found tickets being re-sold for up to six times their original cost, while a report by the Competition and Markets Authority found that tickets currently sold on the resale market are typically marked up by more than 50 per cent, per BBC News.

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Ticketmaster have responded to the news, pointing out that they already only permit fans to re-sell their tickets “up to the price they paid”, having capped re-sale prices since 2018.

Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s parent company, “fully supports the UK government’s plan to ban ticket resale above face value,” they said in a statement.

“Ticketmaster already limits all resale in the UK to face value prices, and this is another major step forward for fans — cracking down on exploitative touting to help keep live events accessible,” they continued. “We encourage others around the world to adopt similar fan-first policies.”

Secondary ticket company Viagogo responded in a statement, saying that price caps have “repeatedly failed fans” in countries like Ireland and Australia, having “pushed consumers towards social media and unregulated sites, where fraud rates are nearly four times higher than in the UK.”

Viagogo have pointed towards “open ticketing” as a solution: “connecting primary and resale platforms in real time to verify tickets,” their statement read. “Open ticketing allows the sharing of critical information to identify illegal bot activity and eliminate fraud. It’s the same type of technology that allows people to book flights through airlines or travel sites. Opening the market to greater competition also helps drive prices down as more platforms compete on prices, fees and services.”

Viagogo went on to argue that “open ticketing would challenge the primary monopoly of Live Nation and Ticketmaster as they control 80 per cent of the ‘primary’ ticketing market and are under investigation by the Department of Justice in the US.”

The need for reform has been sought after for a long time, but was accelerated by last year’s high-profile Oasis debacle, which saw tickets for their long-awaited reunion tour sold with ‘surge’ pricing This infuriated thousands of fans, with experts claiming that the practice could be in breach of consumer law, and was placed under investigation by both the European Commission and Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK.

Oasis previously said that they “at no time had any awareness that dynamic pricing was going to be used” in the sale, claiming that “prior meetings between promoters, Ticketmaster and the band’s management resulted in a positive ticket sale strategy, which would be a fair experience for fans, including dynamic ticketing to help keep general ticket prices down as well as reduce touting, the execution of the plan failed to meet expectations.”

Speaking to NME earlier this year, MP Chris Bryant discussed the obstacles of the secondary ticket market: “The number one issue is how many tickets you should be able to buy because it’s clear that bots using artificial names manage to hoover up hundreds of them. How do we deal with that?

“Number two is the cap and how much that should be. Should it be face value only? That’s what the Principality Stadium does for Welsh Rugby Union matches. Or should it be plus fees or plus 10-30 per cent? That’s the kind of range we’re consulting on.

“Thirdly, we’re consulting on whether there should be a licensing system. We’re open to views on that. Our manifesto commitment was to tend to appalling abuses that you see already in the secondary ticket market. We said we’d deal with it in the General Election, we intend to, and that’s the main part of our consultation.

“We’re not asking whether to act, we’re asking how to act and what action to take.”

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