Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of the effect on the (a) frequency and (b) viability of large-scale automated ticket reselling of the (a) Digital Economy Act 2017 and (b) other recent steps the Government has taken.

We are determined to crackdown on unacceptable behaviour in the online ticketing market, whilst ensuring there are no unintentional consequences for the operations of the events sector.

The Digital Economy Act 2017 provides the power to create a specific offence, where tickets are purchased electronically, of purchasing more tickets than the maximum permitted, to address concerns over large scale automated ticket reselling. We intend to enact this power via secondary legislation later this year, and will be monitoring its effectiveness once enacted. This measure is in addition to existing measures in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 relating to the information about tickets offered for sale on the secondary market, along with the additional requirement also contained in the Digital Economy Act for ticket sellers to provide a unique ticket number when re-selling a ticket, where one has originally been given.

We recognise that Government can’t act alone in addressing this issue, and that the ticketing industry, regulatory bodies, and online platforms need to take actions themselves. We welcome the action taken earlier this month by the Advertising Standards Authority against four of the main operators in the secondary ticketing sector banning the misleading presentation of pricing information on their websites, which we hope will help improve transparency in the market and help consumers find legitimate official ticketing sites.

The measures set out above, together with the ongoing enforcement work of the National Trading Standards and the Competition and Markets Authority, and industry’s own initiatives should go a long way to reducing people’s frustrations at the way the ticketing market works.