Rugby World Cup ticket scalping continues to cause outrage in Britain with a pair of tickets to the final being touted for almost $50,000.

The opposition Labour Party is putting heat on the government with research showing ticket prices on the secondary market are reaching 40 times their original value.

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Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Chris Bryant is on the warpath after England Rugby 2015 lobbied with no success for legislation to outlaw resale except through official channels, as was the case for the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games.

Britain's new Consumer Rights Act contains a clause that forced secondary sites to display detailed ticket information and allowed governing bodies to cancel tickets if they felt they were being sold in breach of terms and conditions.

But Bryant told the Guardian newspaper that the limited provisions in the Act, used to monitor ticket sales during the just completed Ashes cricket series, were not good enough to discourage tickets being resold on "an industrial scale" because the maximum penalty was just over $10,000.

"The government promised to protect the tournament from unfair ticket touting but with less than a month until the World Cup, it is clear that fans are being ripped off left right and centre and ministers are doing nothing about it," Bryant told the Guardian.

"Rugby is crying out for extra investment in pitches, coaches and kit but it is a scandal that the government is allowing fans to be charged 40 times the face value of a ticket with nothing going to the grassroots game, the players or the stadia. That money just goes into the pockets of parasitical rip-off merchants who add no value whatsoever."

A spokesman for secondary market leader Viagogo told the paper the Rugby World Cup was the most popular event it had been involved with and strongly defended its free-market business model.

"It is perfectly legal to resell a rugby ticket if you want to. We believe once you've bought something, whether that's a house, a car, or a ticket, it's up to you what you do with it and you should be allowed to resell it at whatever the market value is," he said.

"Since the days of the gladiators, people have been reselling tickets to sporting events. The difference is that since Viagogo introduced our safe and secure marketplace, nobody need now take risks buying from classified ads, auction sites, or even worse from a shady character outside the venue."

Rugby World Cup organisers say the situation simply emphasises their warnings to buy from official outlets.