The Government has announced that it plans to make it illegal to resell tickets for live events above their original cost.

The announcement follows the Government’s consultation on the resale of tickets to live events earlier this year (on which we commented here) and against the backdrop of a manifesto commitment to introduce “new consumer protections on ticket resales”.

According to the Government’s response to the consultation, there was a “strong sentiment that ticket touting should not be permitted, and that the government should take action to eliminate the financial incentives that currently drive this activity”. The Government agrees, stating that “for too long, the live events sector has been plagued by the practices of ticket touts who buy and resell tickets on a systematic and speculative basis – exploiting committed fans by charging vastly inflated prices on the secondary market and unfairly extracting value from the live events sector”.

Accordingly, a range of measures will be introduced:

It will be unlawful to resell tickets for live events for any more than their original cost. The ‘original ticket cost’ will include any unavoidable transaction costs incurred when the ticket is first purchased, but will exclude any optional goods and services.

The Government is considering “tightly drawn and narrowly defined” exemptions, such as allowing tickets to be resold by registered charities for fundraising purposes or allowing debenture holders to resell their tickets above the price cap. More details on these will be provided in due course.

To ensure that the resale price cap is effective, a cap will also be introduced on the level of service fees that resale platforms can charge on resale transactions. As the Government explains, this is so as to avoid ticket resale platforms charging higher service fees to make up for lost revenue as a result of the resale price cap. No decision has yet been reached on the level of a services fee cap, but the Government says that it is currently gathering evidence and plans to work with industry to reach a level by the time the legislation is brought forward.

The Government will also prohibit someone from reselling more tickets to an event than they were entitled to purchase from the original vendor. The consultation response explains that the “sophisticated evasion tactics practised by many touts, and the difficulty of determining when tickets have been sold across multiple platforms” mean that the Government will not require platforms to enforce this prohibition, but that the ban will work in conjunction with the price cap and Breaching of Limits on Ticket Sales Regulations 2018 to deter touting.

Finally, the Government will require platforms to monitor and enforce compliance with the new rules and extend the consumer enforcement powers of the Competition and Markets Authority to this area so that tougher penalties can be imposed on those who break them.

The new rules will be introduced “when parliamentary time allows”. To read more, click here.