Tuesday 16 June 2015 5:24 am

It turns out only a quarter of tickets at last year’s New Year’s Eve fireworks were sold to Londoners

The first batch of tickets for London's New Year's Eve fireworks extravaganza goes on sale on 19 June – and you'll have to be fast to grab one – it turns out only a quarter of the 100,000 tickets that went on sale for last year's event went to actual, bonafide Londoners.

Figures obtained by Labour London Assembly member Fiona Twycross show that of the 100,000 tickets sold for last year's event, during which the London Eye was lit up by thousands of fireworks, only 27,476 were sold to residents who live in the capital.

Twycross pointed out that the £10 price of tickets only covered the cost of the "ticketing infrastructure", meaning London's taxpayers were left to foot the bill for the rest of the event.

"Thousands of Londoners [are] missing out on the iconic NYE celebrations," said Twycross.

However, a City Hall spokesperson suggested that non-Londoners may previously have made up a vast proportion of the crowd – it's just that before ticketing was introduced, it was difficult to tell.

“Ticketing meant that last year, for the first time, we could accurately record where people in the viewing areas came from and meant that Londoners with tickets were guaranteed a view of the display. The proportion of people attending in 2014 recorded as being Londoners was broadly in line with numbers estimated to have attended in previous years.

"In previous years, due to the event’s popularity, hundreds of thousands of people were heading to central London right up to midnight, the majority of them, including Londoners, unable to see anything."