Look very carefully at your parenthesis - Perl uses these to figure out what it's returning from the match.

If all your lines are going to be of that format, and you can trust the data, it's possible to match the entire string using:

/^([\w\s,.&-]+)/

which works fine for me here for your given data.

Hope that helps ..
--Foxcub

Update: Or just use $_. It's easier. :)