It’s hard to believe that we’re closing in on five years since the UK’s gambling reform review was launched. The consultation that led to April 2023’s long-awaited White Paper has resulted in several legislative and regulatory changes that are likely to reshape the businesses of many UK-facing operators.
Despite the fact that some of the White Paper reforms are yet to roll out and others have been introduced only in recent months, there have already been calls for more to be done.
In early May, the Health and Social Care Committee wrote to the Department of Health and Social Care calling for greater protections from gambling-related harm. The letter focused specifically on advertising, following an evidence session on 2 April and a meeting of the campaign group Gambling with Lives, on 22 April.
Responding to the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ (OHID) clarification that advertising does not fall within its remit for reform, the committee wrote: “We do not see how OHID can effectively develop a strategy to prevent gambling-related harms without considering the regulation of advertising and broader commercial practices of the sector.”
All this, five years after erstwhile Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson launched his review. A lot changed in those five years. A lot changed in the two and a half years it took to publish the White Paper. We’ll avoid reliving it in detail, but several prime ministers and secretaries of state were to follow!
The industry characterised the process as a sword of Damocles hanging over its head, as years of uncertainty played out. It wasn’t a situation many operators would want to return to.
Betting and Gaming Council senior adviser Wes Himes expressed his frustration in a piece for iGaming Business at the end of May.
“This bizarre push appears to be founded on a collective amnesia over the fact that the current government not just inherited, but supported, the 2023 white paper review and its proposals, which are only now coming into force,” he said.
“It was rightly described as a ‘once in a generation’ reset for the sector,” he adds, somewhat hopefully. But is once in a generation enough in a world where technology, industry, social sentiment – the zeitgeist – moves so very quickly?
Many commentators agreed, while chronicling the path of the White Paper, that it was coming far too long after the Gambling Act 2005 was brought into law. Here we are, 20 years later, with just one significant review under our belts and five years will have elapsed between the decision to review and many of the recommendations coming into force.
The statutory levy, for example, will not be collected by the Gambling Commission for the first time until 1 October for the 2025-26 levy period. That money will then be funnelled into UK Research and Innovation, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, and the NHS, which are tasked with commissioning programmes and services for the research, prevention, and treatment of gambling-related harm.
With government procurement practices as they are, it will be a long time before the effectiveness of that funding can be evaluated. In the meantime, it is in the interests of all stakeholders for there to be transparency in that process.
In Himes’s missive, he argued that “calls for further restrictive measures before [the White Paper] is even fully implemented, much less come into force, would ignore and undermine five years of work striving for the political and policy balance the white paper promised”.
But the calls for reform around gambling are continuous. Campaign groups and policy makers rarely down tools on this issue and for the industry to bury its head in the sand about that would be unwise.
Yes, the industry needs and should be able to expect a level of continuity, but it should also brace for continual calls for reform and be prepared to defend its position when necessary and adapt where that is the right thing to do.
Himes is right that to try to overhaul regulation again so soon would be foolhardy, but to block out the voices that want it may be just as problematic. And to assume that “once in a generation” is enough in a world that changes so rapidly is probably also unrealistic.
Any tech industry, which gambling increasingly is, is a moving target for regulation. Keeping up with it is extremely difficult, especially within the unavoidably sluggish realm of regulation and policy making.
What is needed is continuous evaluation, ongoing dialogue, and greater collaboration between government and industry. This way no one should be taken completely off guard.
Both sides need to keep the door open — open to sharing learning, open to adjusting, and open to admitting that craving certainty in any walk of modern life is probably going to end in disappointment. Better to expect the unexpected and roll with it.
