The UK government has been urged to take immediate action against so-called ‘bot’ software by the cross-party Culture, Media and Sport committee.
The call by the influential group of MPs came after an evidence session at the House of Commons last week provided an insight into the secondary ticketing market.
The chair of the committee, Conservative MP Damian Collins, has written to Culture Secretary Karen Bradley to call for an immediate ban on the bots, which help scalpers to snap up batches of tickets for events and posts them on resale websites, according to the Guardian newspaper.
The MPs will table an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill that would make it illegal to use software to acquire large numbers of tickets.
Collins said the evidence session had “shed a light on much more far-ranging and disturbing factors in the ticketing markets, including clear indications of too close relationships between those selling tickets on the primary market and sellers on the secondary market”.
He said that the use of bots “appears to be a significant problem” and added that the answers given to the committee by representatives of the secondary ticketing industry “went from complacent to evasive”.
He said: “We are writing to the Secretary of State to ask her to begin to look more closely at this issue but also as a first step that there seems to be a lot of consensus on amending the Digital Economy Bill to ban the technology that harvests tickets on a large scale before genuine fans ever get a look in.”
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