Reselling event tickets for profit is to be outlawed under new UK government plans reportedly due to be announced this week.
As The Guardian reports, the new rules are due to come into effect amid a long-awaited crackdown on touts and resale platforms such as Viagogo and StubHub, following high-profile cases involving tickets for tours by the likes of Oasis and Taylor Swift in recent years.
Ministers had initially been considering allowing people to resell a ticket for up to 30% above its original face value, when carrying out a consultation process on crackdown plans last year. It’s now emerged, though, that the government will go one step further in banning the resale of tickets for above their face value.
Plans to curtail the profiteering of touts were part of the manifesto on which Labour won the 2024 general election, and those measures are now due to be unveiled in detail tomorrow (November 19). Under new laws, regular people will not be allowed to sell a ticket for above face value, while resale platforms will only be allowed to charge fees on top of that. Said fees will be limited, however, in order to ensure that the websites can’t offset profits lost from the new legislation.
The ban on profiting from resale tickets will additionally cover social media sites, though it’s not yet known exactly how that will be policed. Resale ticketing companies have pushed back against the government proposals, claiming that they could lead to a rise in fraudulent ticket sales outside of their own market.
