Government Caves In On Touts

The House Of Lords on Feb. 24 made life a little more difficult for the touts, as people selling on resale sites will now have to state their names, seat numbers and how much the sellers originally paid for tickets.

Those who breach the new laws could face fines of up to £5,000. Culture secretary Sajid Javid agreed to amendments to the Consumer Rights Bill put forward by former Conservative sports minister Lord Moynihan. “We didn’t have much option; we don’t have parliamentary time to get involved in a game of ping-pong with the Lords over this and risk the entire bill falling,” a senior government figure told the Financial Times.

The climbdown comes after Javid, who once described touts as “classic entrepreneurs,” had won a late January vote in the House Of Commons to overturn similar amendments that had been added by the Lords. At the time he said the amendments would “overburden individual fans with red tape.”

The changes in the legislation will mean firms such as Ticketmaster, StubHub, Seatwave and Viagogo will need to publish information on the tickets they sell, including where the tickets came from, their face value and whether reselling them breaches the tickets’ terms and conditions.

Labour’s Baroness Hayter said the amendments aren’t about picking on fans who genuinely need to resell.

“It is about industrial-scale touting, the buying up of sheathes of tickets to make a quick bang,” she said. StubHub has reportedly said it might now have to review its UK business operation. “It’s not great for our business or great news for our consumers,” Brigitte Ricou-Bellan of StubHub told the FT.

Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Secondary Ticketing, said the amendment is “an important step in the right direction.”

“My APPG colleagues and I have campaigned for years to make some real changes to this broken marketplace. The use of new technology has enabled touts to hoover up tickets and drive up prices at the expense of genuine fans, and the law needs to finally address this issue,” she added in a statement.

Ticketmaster says it’ll work with the government to implement the new regulations “to the benefit of all consumers,” while Viagogo pointed out that “the basic principle of being able to buy and sell tickets on secure platforms like ours has not changed.” “The only practical implications of the new legislation are that we might need to publish some additional information about the tickets on our site later this year, but we were already working with the government on that,” Viagogo said in a statement.