Ticket touting is an industrial-scale racket – ministers must stamp it out
3 min read
On 19 November, the government moved further towards a long-held commitment to “put fans first” by cracking down on online ticket touting and introducing a price cap on the resale of tickets.
In fact, “cracking” hardly does it justice. In the official press release, the Business Secretary stated his desire to "smash to pieces" the exploitative model of online ticket touting – whereby dedicated resellers illegally harvest huge volumes of tickets at face value, before immediately dumping them onto offshore resale websites at vastly inflated prices.
According to research commissioned by O2, this industrial-scale racket already costs music fans £145m a year. Add to this the experiences of football fans, sports attendees and theatre-goers, and you can see why it was essential for the government to act.
This is a black market operating in plain sight, and one ridden with fraud, anti-consumer practices and outright criminality. The losses to the British public and to our cultural and sporting sectors are unfathomable.
Under these new proposals, Labour can put a stop to it – making it illegal to resell a ticket for more than the original cost price, while banning individuals from reselling more tickets than they can legitimately purchase in the original sale. Meanwhile, resale platforms such as viagogo and StubHub will have their own exorbitant service fees capped, and be forced to police the tickets they list.
Ironically, had certain Conservative members not talked out a Private Members Bill that I submitted back in 2010, that sought to cap ticket resale prices at face value, UK consumers may have escaped these excesses of the so-called “secondary ticketing” market and saved themselves a few billion pounds.
But you can’t keep a good idea down, and I’m genuinely delighted that the government has listened thoughtfully to the cross-party expertise of the APPG on Ticket Abuse alongside others who have campaigned for so long for fairer ticketing practices.
However, having endured this rip off for 15 years longer than necessary, it is now vital we act. Primary legislation must be included in the next King’s Speech. More than that, we desperately need the right kind of legislation; backed up by the right kind of enforcement.
To my mind, it means these new measures must adhere to the “three s’s”: they must be simple, straightforward and supranational in scope. They have to be a deterrent to ticket touts and rogue ticket platforms that target UK consumers from overseas.
They need to force intermediaries like Google to do the right thing, and to stop misdirecting ticket buyers away from legitimate ticket and venue websites. And they need to be enforced quickly and effectively – ideally by a dedicated boost to the funding of National Trading Standards.
Finally, they have to result in market change. The aim of this process is not only to smash to pieces the price gouging activities of touts, it’s to replace them with something better – namely, a competing range of capped fan-to-fan services that allow people to easily resell unwanted tickets at no more than cost price.
For that to happen, we also need the music, theatre and sports industries to step up and show their support. These sectors already provide capped consumer-friendly resale across the board, although I suspect all could improve their marketing and make the ticket purchasing process more transparent to navigate.
When anybody buys a ticket in the future, it should be inherently clear how they can use it and how they can resell it. Only at that moment can victory over the touts finally be declared.
Sharon Hodgson is the Labour MP for Washington and Gateshead South, and chair of the APPG on Ticket Abuse
