Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has voiced her fury over fans getting ripped off with high ticket costs as she laid out government plans to cap the price of resale tickets
The Culture Secretary has voiced her fury over fans getting ripped off with high ticket costs as she laid out plans to cap the price of resale tickets.
In the latest update on Friday, Lisa Nandy suggested the cap will be around 5% or 10% of an original ticket price but that a consultation was ongoing to confirm the exact figure. She said ticket touts who charge ridiculous prices for resale tickets will face the full force of new laws – which will include them getting fines.
The government is proposing a cap on how much extra ticket resellers can charge. Ms Nandy said they are now consulting on exactly how much more people can add on, telling BBC Breakfast: “So say I buy a ticket for Beyoncé… I realise I can’t go and I want to sell it on. under these proposals, I will be able to sell it on and cover additional costs potentially.
“So I might be able to sell it on at a price, or at 5% more or at 10% more. What I wouldn’t be able to do is add 200% to the price of that ticket… for fear of breaking a law, for fear of incurring a fine.”
The government has announced a consultation will consider the cap among a range of options to make ticket-buying fairer for fans after concert sales for artists including Taylor Swift and Oasis were marred by professional touts reselling at heavily inflated prices. Others have been caught out by a lack of transparency over the system of dynamic pricing, which left Oasis fans watching the price of some standard tickets more than double from £148 to £355 as they waited in the queue.
Ms Nandy said: “We’re looking at the way in which fans are bottlenecked into systems where the prices will then inflate while they’re trying to get the tickets, and when there are fairer ways to do that, we’re looking at transparency, because obviously, with the Oasis issue, so many people thought they were paying one price, then they got to the front of the queue and found that the tickets had inflated beyond what they could afford.”
She added: “It’s not for the government to set the price of a ticket. If Oasis want to play and set the price of a ticket with their company, that’s what they do and we propose that that, of course, continues. What we’re stopping is the practice where then tickets touts will buy up those tickets and then sell them on at vastly inflation.”
Typical mark-ups on tickets sold on the secondary market are more than 50%, according to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), while investigations by Trading Standards have uncovered evidence of tickets being resold for up to six times their original cost. Trading Standards can already issue fines of up to £5,000 for ticketing rule breaches, but the consultation will consider whether this cap should be increased.
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UK Music chief executive Tom Kiehl said: “UK Music welcomes this move to support music fans and the music industry, which generates £7.6 billion a year for the economy and supports 216,000 jobs. We want to see an end to speculative selling with a clear price cap that means tickets can only be resold under a fair and reasonable system of resale.
“There needs to be far tougher controls on the secondary market and the use of digital bots to protect genuine music fans and put them first to restore the integrity of ticket sales for live events.”
Musician and DJ Fatboy Slim said: “Great to see money being put back into fans’ pockets instead of resellers. Fully behind this effort to make sure more people can enjoy incredible arts and music events across the country without being ripped off. It is part of the change this government were elected to make.”