Kingsholm Rugby World Cup tickets being re-marketed for £300 amid fears hardworking fans will be priced out Fears have been raised that tickets for this year’s Rugby World Cup could be put beyond the reach of genuine fans and hardworking families. Thats if the House of Commons fails to back a bill on Monday designed to tackle ticket touting, Gloucesters Labour Party challenger has warned. Sophy Gardner, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Gloucester, fears tickets will become unaffordable for the city’s regular rugby fans if no action is taken to stop touts buying up tickets and selling them on at highly inflated prices. With tickets for matches at Kingsholm already being listed online for £300 – almost four times their face value – Ms Gardner is calling on MPs to back an amendment to the Consumer Rights Bill on Monday, January 12, in order to kick such ticket touting into touch. Ms Gardner said part of the problem stemmed from touts using sophisticated computer software to bulk purchase large numbers of tickets for sporting events, like the Rugby World Cup, when they first become available online. Fans who are unable to buy on the first release are then forced to pay over the odds for tickets, with touts re-selling them online at much higher prices once the event has sold out. The amendments to the Consumer Rights Bill on touting are designed to resolve these problems by allowing event organisers to stop the practice without preventing fans from reselling tickets when they can no longer go to a match. Put forward by a cross-party group of Lords and MPs, the legislation has been welcomed by the Labour Party. But the Government has tabled a motion to reject all the measures. In 2011, now culture secretary Sajid Javed described ticket touts as ‘classic entrepreneurs’. Labour’s Sophy Gardner said: “The Culture Secretary is completely out of touch on this. Ticket touts aren’t ‘classic entrepreneurs’ but are ripping off fans by buying up tickets and then reselling them at massively inflated prices. “Using special programmes to bulk purchase tickets as soon as they go on sale ordinary fans don’t stand a chance of getting through to book online. “MPs across parliament support this measure, as do major sports bodies, cultural institutes and music industry representatives. That’s why I hope the Government listens and changes its mind on opposing this. “Although tickets for the Rugby World Cup have already sold out, if no action is taken any tickets that might become available could well be put beyond the reach of Gloucester rugby fans and hardworking families and that would be a travesty.”
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 08:07:38 +0000
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