The Draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill is structurally a thin substantive prohibition bolted onto a pre-existing enforcement engine. The Bill itself will create three prohibitions (resale above original cost, breach of a service-fee cap on resale platforms, and resale exceeding the volume originally entitled to be purchased) plus a fourth duty layer (strict obligations on resale platforms to police listings). It does not need to build its own enforcement architecture because the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 Part 3 regime already provides one.
The enforcement engine works as follows. DMCCA Part 3 gives the CMA direct power to investigate and fine breaches of designated consumer protection legislation, with penalties calibrated to global turnover up to a 10% ceiling. SI 2024/1243 (the Turnover and Control Regulations) then specifies the calculation method — most-recent accounting period, look-through to higher preceding-period turnover if the relevant figures are unavailable, group turnover with intra-group transactions netted out, and bespoke turnover definitions for credit institutions and insurers. The Bill will, on enactment, be added to the schedule of legislation enforceable through this route. The headline 'up to 10% of global turnover' figure in the King's Speech briefing is therefore a DMCCA reference, not a freestanding Bill power.
The regime sits alongside, rather than replacing, two pre-existing layers. The first is the Consumer Rights Act 2015 Chapter 5 information regime — the obligation on resale platforms to disclose seat / face-value / restriction information — and its associated CTSI / DCMS guidance (the 2018 'Secondary ticketing websites: guidance for business' document). The second is the Trading Standards civil penalty route (July 2025 appeal guidance), which continues as a parallel local-authority enforcement track. The relationship between the new face-value cap and the existing CRA Chapter 5 disclosure rules is the central drafting question for pre-legislative scrutiny.
Three carve-outs and design choices are notable. First, the cap is at original cost inclusive of unavoidable fees and delivery charges with zero permitted uplift — distinct from the Irish 10%-uplift model and a deliberate Government choice over the 24% of consultation respondents who supported a small uplift. Second, a parallel cap on resale-platform service fees is necessary to prevent platforms from circumventing the ticket-price cap by 'fee inflation' shared with touts — a structural rather than headline design feature. Third, the Government considered but did not adopt a licensing regime for resale platforms, reserving the option to revisit if DMCCA enforcement proves insufficient.
The Bill is announced as 'in draft for pre-legislative scrutiny', which means a select committee process is anticipated before introduction proper. The CMA's near-simultaneous opening of consumer-protection cases against viagogo and StubHub on 18 November 2025 — one day before the Government's consultation response — is best read as operational signalling: the regulator is establishing facts on the ground under the existing regime in a way that will inform both pre-legislative scrutiny and post-enactment enforcement priorities.