Melvin Benn has been talking to BBC Newsbeat about the resale market for tickets.

Leeds Festival bosses have backed Government proposals that could see a limit on the profits made from the resale of gig tickets, with a cap of 10% currently being suggested by MP Sharon Hodgson.

For Leeds Festival tickets on sale yesterday at £192.50, this would mean a total cap of £211.75 for any re-sales of that ticket.

However, if you also consider booking fees (£7) and postage & transaction fees (£5.25) then the actual cost of buying a Leeds 2011 ticket at face value is £204.75.

A more appropriate 10% profit cap would therefore be closer to £225.

In an interview with BBC Newsbeat, Melvin Benn said, “I’ve been asking for a cap for many years. It’s the sort of bill that’s been operational in New York State and Australia. It works. We’ve seen that it works.

“People will still try to set up illegal websites but what it would do is give the public an absolute knowledge that if they’re trying to sell at more than that percentage, it’s almost certainly dodgy and illegal.”

At the time of writing this article, re-sale tickets for Leeds Festival are being sold at Viagogo priced from £226.93. Viagogo are the official ticket exchange partner of Reading and Leeds Festivals and endorsed by Festival Republic on the official site.

The bill is to be discussed in Parliament in May 2011.

In related news, a Leeds Festival ticket scammer was recently found guilty of ‘speculative selling’, after it emerged he accepted money for tickets to the Leeds Festival in 2008 that he did not actually possess.

On this conviction Melvin Benn said, “”We are pleased that this case in relation to the speculative sale of 2008 Leeds Festival tickets has been successful.”

“Festival Republic is proactive in its endeavours to protect its potential customers from buying tickets from unauthorised sources”

Here at Leeds Festival we always recommend you buy tickets from authorised agencies, be they the primary sellers or the Festival Republic’s approved exchange partner Viagogo.

We list authorised ticket agencies on our Leeds tickets page.