Gavin Grey: UK correspondent on the UK Government banning ticket reselling above face value

The UK Government has confirmed it aims to ban people from reselling tickets from live events to make a profit.

Restricting ticket scalpers was one of the Labour Government's election pledges, and it comes after  Sam Fender, Dua Lipa and Coldplay urged Sir Keir Starmer to take action.

UK correspondent Gavin Grey says more details of this plan will be revealed soon.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Devin Gray Uka correspondents with us Elogevin hither Hell Heaven.
Have you read this Guardian piece about Nigel Farage.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
I have, yes. It's a very interesting piece about Nigel Farage,
who of course is helped secure Brexit back in twenty
sixteen and leads the Reform Party, which is led I
think more than the last one hundred opinion polls in
this country, a real upstart political party. It's a piece
about Nigel Farage's time at school. Now you might think,

(00:30):
being some fifty years ago, that this would all long
be forgotten. But of course, if he is going to
be our next prime minister, and there are plenty of
people who think he will be, such as the sheer
disdain for the two main political parties at the moment,
that people are going to dig up his history and
have a look at his time. And he went to
Dullage College, which is a private school, very exclusive school

(00:52):
in the south of London. And the Guardian newspaper here,
the left wing paper, has spoken to plenty of his
former school boy colleagues and some of them are not
painting a particularly nice image, claiming that he was a contrarian.
That's a polite one. Others are saying he sang right
wing and anti Semitic songs, that he was always a

(01:14):
bit of an upstart, a bit of a trouble maker,
and was continually sort of picking on boys who weren't
white British as it were. Now those are the allegations.
He has come back with various legal letters to the Guardian.
The party Reform UK is saying that it's no coincidence
this newspaper is seeking to discredit Reform UK that's led

(01:36):
one hundred and fifty consecutive opinion polls and we fully
expect these cynical attempts to smear Reform and mislead the
public to intensify further as we move closer to the
next election. And I have to say there will be
some who would say this was fifty years ago. Is
this the best they could do?

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Well, that's the question I had when I read it.
I mean, fear enough, the guy is going to be
the Prime minister. Maybe, and obviously when you have a
prime minister interested in their history, but is it relevant
what he did when he was thirteen years old.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah. What they're trying to do is to paint a
consistent image of him being far right, and some of
those interviews with some of the pupils sort of suggests
that still the case, or sorry that that was the case,
but others say, you, well, we can't. I can't remember
him using those words, or I can't remember him singing

(02:26):
that song. And you know we are talking all that
time ago and one person referring to a song that
was sung on a coach trip, Well, I can't remember
fifty years ago what was sung on a coach trip.
So I look, I think there is an element here
of the left wing Guardian paper, like many people in
this country uncomfortable with the prospect of Nigel Farag just

(02:47):
the potential leader. Others are very comfortable with that and
see him as a route out of the mess this
country is in. But it does seem extraordinarly that there's
this huge gap then between his school days when he
when he was eighteen, right through until present day. So yeah,
I'm not sure how consistently impactful this will be, particularly

(03:09):
as it's come into The Guardian and that's a paper
that's well known for not liking right wing politics.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah, it's a fair point that you make. Listen, so
when does it become ilegal to sell tickets for a profit.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, since really this government is now really trying to
push on the fact that if you buy a ticket
for a concert, you can't then resell it for more
than the face value. And now there are some very
successful and popular sites that already do that. Resale sites
like via go go and stub hub are basically saying
that this price cap, limiting the price of any resale

(03:42):
to that face value, is going to push customers towards
unregulated sites and also people selling things on social media,
and that of course will put them at risk of
increased risk of buying fraudulent tickets or fake tickets, and
that has been a real thing that the ministers have
been looking at and don't really seem to have issued

(04:03):
an answer for that. They are looking at basically sorting
this out and the consultation on the changes as canvas
views on capping tickets at face value or anything up
to thirty percent above the face value of a ticket,
because we have seen Oasis tickets, for instance, be sold
for huge sums of money and then resold for even

(04:26):
higher sums of money. So restricting ticket touts was one
of this government's election pledges fans complaining of massively inflated
prices for resold tickets, and this is an attempt to
do something about it if they're announcing the plan in
just a few hours time.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Brilliant stuff. Thank you so much, Gevin, appreciate it. Gavin Gray, UK, corresponding.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
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