King's Speech 2026: Draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill

Draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill

● For far too long, fans have been ripped off by touts buying large volumes of
tickets online and reselling them for vastly inflated prices. The Government
wants to help fans keep more of their hard-earned cash with action to make it
illegal for tickets to live events to be resold for more than their original cost,
eliminating the scourge of industrial scale ticket touting.

● These measures will support our creative industries, one of the Government’s
eight Industrial Strategy growth sectors, by diverting profits away from
unscrupulous touts and back into our world-famous live events sector – as well
as putting money back into the pockets of hard-working people.

What does the Bill do?

● The Bill, which will be published in draft for pre-legislative scrutiny, will seek to
destroy the operating model of ticket touts, improve access for genuine fans
when tickets originally go on sale, and end rip-off resale prices once and for
all.

● The Bill will:

○ Make it illegal to resell a ticket for a live event at more than its
original cost, reducing the average price of a resale ticket by £37 and
saving fans £112 million collectively each year.

○ Cap the service fees charged by resale platforms, preventing them
from inflating their fees to profit share with touts.

○ Make it illegal for someone to resell more tickets than they were
originally entitled to buy on the primary market.

○ Place strict obligations on ticket resale platforms to make sure they
are truly accountable for ensuring the new rules are adhered to on their
sites.

○ Empower the Competition and Markets Authority to impose tough
fines of up to ten per cent of global turnover upon those found to be
breaching the new laws.

64
 ● Taken together, this will mean that ticket touting will no longer be a profitable
business in the UK, whilst still allowing genuine fans the ability to resell tickets
for events they can no longer attend in a safe and secure way. Tackling touts
will also help support the cost of living crisis by making it easier for genuine
fans to buy tickets from primary sellers when they first go on sale, enabling
more affordable prices on resale platforms, and creating a fairer system
where hard-working people get the access they deserve.

Territorial extent and application

● The Bill will extend and apply to the whole of the UK.

Key facts

● Ticket touts, enabled by advances in digital technology, are using bots to buy
up large numbers of tickets for live events on the primary market and resell
them at vastly inflated prices on resale platforms.

● Typical mark-ups on secondary market tickets exceed 50 per cent, whilst
investigations by Trading Standards have found evidence of tickets being
resold at six times their original cost.

● These issues have been subject to intense media reporting around the
release of tickets for popular events, most notably the Oasis Live ‘25 Tour
announced in 2024.

● The secondary ticketing market is dominated by a relatively small
number of touts operating at scale. It is estimated that the 200 largest
resellers accounted for around 50 per cent of the ticket sales (by value) being
sold on secondary ticketing platforms.

● Government analysis suggests that these measures could save fans around
£112 million annually, with 900,000 more tickets bought directly from primary
sellers each year. Inclusive of all fees paid, the average ticket price paid by
fans on the resale market could be reduced by £37.

65