According to reporting in the Times newspaper this week, the UK’s painfully protracted review of gambling regulation has been unboxed, dusted down, and elevated back into the light by the country’s latest Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.
The review, which was kicked off by Boris Johnson’s administration at the tail end of 2020, was shelved by flash-in-the-pan PM Liz Truss, who had bigger fish to fry, namely the economy. (Which she managed to flambé to within an inch of its life in the few seconds she held onto power.) As such, the contents of an apparently long-complete white paper have now been under wraps for around six months.
However, according to Times reporter Steven Swinford, Sunak is keen to keep the Conservative-manifesto pledge of reforming gambling legislation alive, and the introduction of £2-£5 maximum stakes at online slots is being mooted. Swinford says the maximum stakes are designed to create “parity” with the limits placed on fixed-odds betting terminals in 2018.
Perhaps less controversial is the suggestion of affordability checks, although how these will be accomplished is unclear. One Tory MP this week warned against ‘blanket’ affordability limits, likening them to setting a limit on how much everyone can spend on alcohol in a bid to protect alcoholics.
However, much of the industry agrees that being able to use open banking-like software to check that punters can afford the bets they’re placing would be useful. The issue is data privacy and as yet, no one has come up with a viable solution to that somewhat lynchpin issue.
Swinford says the government intends on holding a separate consultation on affordability. So by recent timelines, it’s probably safe to assume that affordability reform demonstrating any level of nuance is a while off.
Other measures that have been mooted in the past include more stringent age-verification checks to prevent gambling by under 18s and the appointment of an ombudsman to deal with consumer complaints against the industry.
Curiously, the Times article suggests that plans to curb free bets and VIP promotions by operators have been dropped, as has banning gambling companies from football-shirt sponsorship.
While this is great news for operators’ marketing departments and the Premier League’s coffers, it seems an odd choice if public and industry sentiment over the last few years is anything to go by. It was only in 2019 that legacy Entain boss Kenneth Alexander (then chief executive of GVC Holdings) publicly denounced sports advertising and supported the whistle-to-whistle ban.
The government is relying on a voluntary approach to the sponsorship issue, presumably hoping that clubs themselves turn their backs on gambling money. It will be interesting to see how picky they are as the country moves further into what is predicted to be a long and challenging recession. It took the invasion of a European country for them to reject oligarchs’ money, and then there’s the allure of Qatar … Just saying.
It remains unclear when the white paper will surface. Some politicians are pushing for publication before Christmas, while others told Swinford it was likely to take longer than that.
Meanwhile, the usual warnings are ringing out from industry bodies and veterans. The Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) released figures last week suggesting that 67% of UK punters believe compulsory spending limits could drive more people to the unregulated black market. What’s more, the BGC said 64% of the public fear that if use of illegal sites were to increase, it would trigger a rise in the rate of problem gambling.
Perhaps more interesting, particularly for the government’s forthcoming consultation, is that 70% of gamblers said they would not be willing to allow regulated operators to carry out compulsory affordability checks to prove they can afford to wager. Herein lies the problem for the government’s affordability-checks agenda. Even if there were a way to anonymise data, gaining public support for any level of prying into its financial affairs will be extremely difficult.
“Any changes introduced by the government must be carefully targeted, so that we protect the vulnerable and intervene on those showing signs of harm, whilst not driving the vast majority of millions of punters who bet safely towards the growing unsafe black market online, where there are none of the safer gambling protections used by BGC members”, said BGC chief executive Michael Dugher.
Meanwhile, speaking at a briefing on 25 November, Gambling Commission CEO Andrew Rhodes said it is not for the regulator to “make a moral judgement” on punters’ spending. Rhodes also alluded to the spectre of emerging technologies, such as crypto and NFTs, but chose not to address them in detail.
Instead, he said, “The illegal market will always continue to evolve and is difficult to eliminate, so our efforts will increasingly be further upstream to seek to disrupt these illegal sites as much as possible.”
With the current upheaval in the crypto market, gambling policy makers may be forgiven for assuming that the threat is minimal. However, a lack of regulation in crypto has been a catalyst for catastrophic losses of consumer funds over the last few months. Regulating after the event is perhaps not the most advisable approach.
