Ticket touts could face £5,000 fines under new legislation

We've all been there - finger hovering over F5 at nine in the morning - to try and get tickets for your favourite artist or a big sports event.

If you miss out then it's onto one of the secondary ticketing sites, where you might well end up spending a lot more to get those same seats.

But now, in a dramatic policy U-turn, the Government is set to make ticket touting much more difficult.

And those which breach the new laws could face fines of up to £5,000.

Under new legislation, passed by the House of Lords, people re-selling their tickets in the secondary market will be regulated more closely.

After pressure from MPs and event organisers, sellers on sites will now have to give extra details.

For example - if you can't make that Taylor Swift gig and you put it on a resale site - you'll probably have to put your name, your seat number and how much you originally paid for it.

Fail to do that and you could be committing a criminal offence.

Labour's Baroness Hayter said this new legislation wasn't about picking on fans who genuinely need to resell.

"It is about industrial scale touting, the buying up of sheathes of tickets to make a quick bang," she said.

She's talking about people who use computer software, known as bots, which can snaffle up remaining tickets and then place them on the secondary market sites in an instant.

But the move wasn't popular with the sites themselves.

Brigitte Ricou-Bellan, the CEO of one online ticketing seller, StubHub International, told Newsbeat she had concerns.

"We strongly support transparency and have no issue with people providing row, seat number and the face value of a ticket provided there are robust safeguards against cancellation and blacklisting. But serious questions remain as to how robust these safeguards will be," she said.

"We don't cap the price at which people can resell their car or their house. Why should a ticket be any different?"

A spokesperson for Ticketmaster told us: "Fans are demanding better access to tickets, with greater levels of choice and flexibility; recent research having shown that 80% of the British public want the right to resell tickets."

Meanwhile viagogo told Newsbeat it would carry on as normal.

"It's business as usual at viagogo. Ticket resale was legal yesterday, is legal today, and will still be legal tomorrow."

A Government spokesperson said: "The provisions agreed today will allow them (venues) to flourish, whilst ensuring consumers are better informed when buying second hand tickets."

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