Reselling Tickets at Higher Prices Now Illegal in UK
Image credit: Francesca Lynes
It is now illegal to resell live tickets at inflated prices, but there’s still a long way to go to improve ticketing culture for fans.
As of the 19th November 2025, the UK government have announced plans to ‘make it illegal for tickets to concerts, theatre, comedy, sport and other live events to be resold for more than their original cost’. In the era of digital tickets and online queues, touting has become an enormous problem, with large-scale bot operations buying up vast quantities of tickets and selling them back to fans at inflated prices.
The government’s stated aim is to improve the disastrous cost of living and make live entertainment better for fans. Hopefully their intervention will remind ticketing companies (I mostly mean resellers, but I’m also looking at you, Ticketmaster) that live events don’t purely exist as a way to squeeze money out of people. Many of us, myself included, have been forced to accept dodgy tactics from ticketing companies and resellers out of desperation – what other option do you have if you really want to go to something? We needed a greater authority to step in.
The government have also recently had a word with Ticketmaster in the wake of the Oasis ticket fiasco, where Ticketmaster sold tickets for drastically higher prices than previously advertised. This, plus the high-pressured online queue where many fans spent hours waiting tensely ‘in line’, led many fans to part with hundreds of pounds more than they’d planned to spend. The government concluded that Ticketmaster must commit to giving notice about ticket prices and displaying prices more clearly online. This transparency can only be a good thing, although the government is suggesting fines as a consequence if the rules aren’t followed, which might only be a slap on the wrist for a company as immense as Ticketmaster.
It will be interesting to see how well these new regulations can be enforced. Will the reselling law simply just open up even more of a black market for ticket resellers, as people move away from formerly legitimate reselling platforms? But even a small amount of improvement would be extremely welcome in the current ticketing landscape.
If this new legislation goes well, I’d welcome the government stepping in on more ticket-related issues. First of all, I’d like to see something done about the unpredictable (and often extortionate) processing and ‘handling’ fees that ticket providers are getting very comfortable with. Who exactly is ‘handling’ a completely virtual gig ticket that comes in an automated email?
I also wish something could be done about the epidemic of the tiered ‘release’ ticketing system. It’s one thing to have an early bird price for a festival, but tiered releases for midweek club nights are absolutely ridiculous. A final-release ticket for Leeds’ new Maad City club night at Belgrave comes to £8.77 with fees, which is too close to a tenner for comfort. This pressurised approach to marketing goes against the spontaneity of club culture, and it also seems like a sneaky excuse to oversell tickets – hoping that some of the people who get a ticket weeks in advance will forget, or no longer be able to attend.
And finally, please, can we have a law against all of those robots invading Whatsapp groups to advertise that they’re selling Ariana Grande tickets? UK government, msg me if you’re interested xx
Words by Rowan Morrow