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UK ministers plan to ban the resale of tickets for live events above their original cost, in an aggressive crackdown on touts and resellers who sharply increase the price of admission to concerts and sports events.
In plans to be announced on Wednesday, reselling a ticket above face value will be outlawed, government and industry figures told the Financial Times.
The big profits made by resellers were highlighted last year when thousands of Oasis fans complained about the cost of buying tickets to see the rock band in 2025.
Some tickets for Oasis shows at Wembley Stadium in London were listed at more than £4,000 — well above their original value.
New legislation being drawn up by the Labour government will also cap service fees charged by resale platforms to stop price limits being undermined by the addition of hidden costs to a ticket.
Ministers want to make it illegal for people to resell more tickets than they were entitled to buy in the initial sale, in an attempt to end industrial-scale touting, in which bots are used to buy up vast numbers of tickets.
The government declined to comment.
The proposed changes would be a blow to popular secondary ticket platforms such as Viagogo and StubHub.
Shares in StubHub, which resells tickets under the StubHub brand in North America and the Viagogo brand elsewhere, dropped more than 14 per cent in New York afternoon trading on Monday.
Secondary ticketing platforms argue that proposals to limit price increases risk creating an illegal black market for tickets.
A spokesperson for StubHub International, which is a separate business to StubHub and resells tickets in the UK, Germany and other parts of Europe, criticised the British government’s plans.
“With a price cap on regulated marketplaces, ticket transactions will move to black markets. When a regulated market becomes a black market, only bad things happen for consumers,” they said.
Some MPs and industry groups have also argued this would lead to fewer consumer protections.
But fans have been left frustrated by intermediaries selling tickets for increasingly high prices.
The outcry over tickets for the Oasis reunion led ministers to launch a consultation in January into options for a crackdown, initially focused on a cap at 30 per cent above the original face value of a ticket.
But Wednesday’s announcement will go further, with a total ban on sales “above original cost” for tickets to concerts, sport, comedy and theatre.
The new rules are expected to shave up to £40 from the average cost of a resale ticket, saving tens of millions of pounds for fans every year.
In a statement last week, artists such as Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Mogwai and Radiohead called on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to cap ticket resale prices and tackle “extortionate and pernicious” websites used by touts.
Touts cost gig-goers about £145mn a year in elevated prices, according to Let’s Stamp it Tout, a campaign started by Virgin Media O2, which is also part of the FanFair Alliance, comprising managers and teams for artists including the Arctic Monkeys and Ed Sheeran.
It said that one in five tickets ended up on a resale platform.
Analysis by Virgin Media O2 of resale sites this summer found that tickets for acts such as such as Diana Ross, Oasis and Lady Gaga in London were being resold for up to 490 per cent on average above face value.
Its research found that traders selling more than 100 tickets a year accounted for more than 82 per cent of tickets on resale sites for a Billie Eilish concert, highlighting what it called the extent of the work of “industrial-scale” touts.
