APPG Calls for Transparency on Touts

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Ticket Abuse has published its findings and recommendations following a recent review of the secondary ticketing market. The APPG report doesn’t call for secondary sales to be banned or capped but focuses on greater transparency and putting measures in place to protect fans from fraudulent sales.

This includes proposing guaranteed compensation for victims of ticket scams through resale websites and legal requirements for more transparency from resale websites such as Seatwave and Viagogo. In addition, the group called for a national Police agency to take on the responsibility of prosecuting people committing ticketing crimes.

Discussing the report and the secondary ticketing market, the Prime Minister’s Intellectual Property Adviser and Co-Chair of the group Mike Weatherley MP (pictured) said: “The whole industry needs to be much more open. Consumers deserve to know which tickets they’re buying and who they’re buying them from”.

Weatherly continued: “Nobody’s saying there shouldn’t be a secondary market, but it needs to work in the favour of consumers and the creative sector, not of a few faceless individuals getting rich off the hard work, investment and talent of others”.

The APPG will now table amendments to the Consumer Rights Bill, due to be debated in the House Of Commons next month, pushing for obligatory regulations for ticket resale sites to follow.

The transparency measures include a legal requirement for resale websites to publish full information about the tickets listed through them, including information on the seller.

Interestingly, they will also put forward that resale websites should declare when tickets have been given directly to them from an event organiser, alongside investigating the provenance of tickets when an individual tries to sell more than 20 for a single show. This former is presumably an attempt to gain control over the kind of back door deals exposed by Dispatches in 2012.

Find out more and read the full report at the website Putting Fans First.