Sport and music events demand clampdown on ticket touts using eBay auction site

Leading sports bodies and organisers of music events are demanding a change in the law to stop ticket touts using internet auction sites such as eBay.

European regulations allow tickets for concerts and sports matches to be resold at many times their face value because to ban touting would amount to a "restrictive contract".

The Football Association and the Rugby Football Union (RFU) said that they monitored internet sites including the biggest UK auction site, eBay, to check for tickets being sold illegally. They said they would take action against anyone they found selling tickets for their events without authority.

Touts regularly use the site, which this week had more than 2,000 tickets on sale, including many for concerts and sporting events at high prices.

Offers online yesterday included two tickets for the Rolling Stones in Manchester in September with an asking price of £900 – three times the face value. A pair of tickets for the British Grand Prix were available for £300, almost double the £85 per ticket price on the Formula One website.

The tickets are sold anonymously, and buyers bid against a deadline set by the seller. The money and tickets are then exchanged in a transaction from which eBay takes a percentage of the sale price.

The site has come under pressure from Michael Eavis, the organiser of the Glastonbury festival. He said that he had demanded it stop the "extortionate" sale of the tickets. Within hours of tickets for the festival going on sale for £105, some were being offered on eBay for £450 a pair.

Mr Eavis said that his organisation would be e-mailing anyone offering a ticket on the site and telling them: "We've seen you on the website, you won't get your ticket."

A spokesman for eBay said that the site was the conduit for such sales, and could not monitor every transaction. The RFU has just completed a year-long study on touting, and announced that it intended to license a number of authorised re-seller companies for tickets that people wanted to sell on.

"That way, the money stays in the game, rather than going to the touts," said an RFU spokesman. "We found that a lot of people who received allocated tickets sold them to unofficial hospitality companies, who resold them on the internet. That was when we only had one hospitality company offering tickets. Now we're going to have 10 who will be licensed and will pay a fee to resell unwanted tickets."

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) noted that the resale of tickets was not illegal unless it could lead to a public order offence caused by, for example, rival football fans being sold tickets for the same section of a stadium.

"Although some tickets might have clauses banning their resale, it would be a matter for the courts to decide whether it is really legally enforceable," said a spokesman for the DTI, who added that the Government had "no plans" to introduce any laws against ticket touting.