Just as we thought the UK’s gambling reform White Paper couldn’t possibly be hit with any further delays, on 7 February, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a cabinet reshuffle.
In his shake-up, Culture secretary Michelle Donelan was replaced by newly appointed Lucy Frazer; it also resulted in the department responsible for gambling itself being re-modelled.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) will return to its former guise as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, under which gambling sits, while ‘Digital’ was hived off into its own Department for Science, Innovation and Technology under the leadership of Donelan.
Outgoing gambling minister Paul Scully, whose remit included gambling and lotteries, admitted in a tweet shortly after the changes that the new culture minister would need time to get up to speed on the White Paper before publication was likely.
Having undergone no reform since 2005, the gambling industry has been waiting since December 2020 to learn what the latest review has in store. Publication was anticipated last summer, before a string of political setbacks shelved the apparently finished report.
Talk at ICE in London earlier this month left the industry widely anticipating publication by the end of the month. It now seems the best we can hope for is to see the White Paper published before the Easter parliamentary recess starts on 30 March.
The process has, frankly, become a charade at this point. The objectives of the review are noble, but its chances of achieving them are becoming vanishingly small.
As W2 Chief Executive Warren Russell pointed out at ICE, the government’s consultation on reform is now almost two years old, so by the time any of the information gathered sees the light of day, it runs the risk of being out of date. Such is the speed of change.
Since Boris Johnson kicked off the gambling review in late 2020, there have been no less than five UK culture secretaries, all of whom have spent time familiarising themselves not only with the content of the protracted review, but with the intricacies of the industry.
Meanwhile, the industry has waited with bated breath to hear which of numerous leaked and widely debated reforms might be introduced.
Commenting on the latest government roadblock, Betting and Gaming Council Chief Executive Michael Dugher said earlier this month, “It’s time now for the government to end the damaging uncertainty and get on with publishing the White Paper as soon as possible”.
He’s not alone in encouraging the government to make some tangible recommendations. Even the wife of former England footballer Peter Shilton, who has suffered from gambling addiction for years, pleaded for the document to be published after a safer-gambling event last week.
“In a weird way, it’s not fair on anyone”, Stef Shilton said. “It’s not fair on the gambling companies, because everyone is in limbo. You can’t set budgets, you can’t do planning, so everyone is losing out in it being stalled.”
John White, Chief Executive of amusement-machine-industry body Bacta, wrote to the new culture secretary last week, also appealing for clarity and asking that the report not be subject to further delays.
The whole process has a sense of farce around it at this stage. The industry has debated issues around affordability, data sharing, and ad bans for months on end. Ideas on how to overcome barriers to player protection have been shared among industry peers, data has been gathered, but has there been any opportunity for this to be formally fed back into the review, which may well have altered little since its June 2022 iteration?
When the ‘digital’ was removed from DCMS and relocated to a department designed to advance technological innovation, did the critical digital aspects of this industry move with it too? Are they still being considered? Were they ever considered? The entire process seems thoroughly undermined and at risk of coming to an end, after so so long, entirely unfit for purpose.
