Reselling tickets for inflated prices set to be made illegal by the UK government
The UK government is reportedly set to unveil plans to make it illegal to resell concert tickets for inflated prices, in a long-awaited crackdown on the secondary market.
According to The Guardian, the Westminster government will announce legislation later this week which makes it illegal for ticket touts to resell for anything above the original face value price.
After a consultation on the matter ended earlier this year, government ministers had allegedly been floating the idea of allowing touts to resell for up to 30 per cent above the asking price, but this has now seemingly been fully cracked down upon.
The new law will not only impact independent touts selling illegally, but also ticket reselling sites such as StubHub and Viagogo, which have often been criticised for the inflated fees they enforce on customers.
To this end, the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK business watchdog, announced on November 18th that it would be launching an investigation into these companies, as well as six others, to shine a light on the matter and assess whether consumer protection laws have been broken.
It comes as a number of huge British artists, including the likes of Robert Smith and Sam Fender, signed an open letter to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week, urging the government to take action to tackle the secondary ticket market, as they had promised in their election manifesto.
The government plans, reportedly set to be announced on November 19th and which could become part of next year’s King’s Speech, will also offer regulation for ticket sellers on social media for the first time, after warnings that this posed the most dangerous threat to customers.
Much of the renewed focus on cracking down on the secondary ticket market has stemmed from the controversy that emerged from the Oasis reunion tour, where fans reported paying up to double and triple the original face value of tickets in order to see the Britpop band.
Last month, the CMA concluded its investigation into Ticketmaster over claims of dynamic pricing during the sales. Although it said the company hadn’t broken consumer protection laws, it criticised the “misleading” information given to fans during sales, and ensured commitments to make the process more transparent.
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