King's Speech 2026: Draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill

Wednesday, 13 May 2026 12:14

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...Request free trial

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.

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 hardworking 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.