Gambling Commission Won’t Wait Until White Paper Publication to Take Action on Slipping Standards

admin 27/06/2022
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In comments made during the Westminster Media Forum Regulation Conference, Gambling Commission chief executive officer Andrew Rhodes says that the Commission is ready to “ramp up” enforcement if the industry continues to fail to live up to the Commission’s standards.

These comments were given ahead of the release of a Gambling Act review white paper that will explain where the Gambling Commission believes the industry to be right now and what action may need to be taken in the future to protect and maintain high standards.

He said, “On behalf of the Gambling Commission, without waiting for what the white paper may bring, I can give you an overview on what we think needs to happen to make gambling in Great Britain as fair and safe as it can be, and what our next steps are to achieving that.”

Rhodes said, “Despite the successes that can come from this approach, we will not be complacent and will clearly set the standards we expect. We will escalate the penalties for failings if we don’t see the industry start to consistently live up to our standards.” Adding that “We intend to ramp up our enforcement work and the penalties that come with it.”

Rhodes went on to make the point that it is not only the customers that will suffer from falling standards but the operators themselves, saying, “Operators who aren’t compliant are not just letting their customers down or their own businesses. They are letting down the entire sector. Which should be frustrating for operators as much as it is for us.”

He said that these standards aren’t only important for how operators act in the UK, but how the UK’s gambling sector appears to the industry globally, saying “Gambling is increasingly a global industry. Many gambling operators more closely resemble global tech firms than they do traditional bookmakers of yesteryear. And the British market is the largest regulated online market in the world.”

Rhodes also addressed the subject of problem gambling and the metrics that currently exist to monitor gamblers of this ilk in the UK. He said, “While our telephone survey is our official statistic, we also look to the Health Survey data for England, Scotland, and Wales for problem gambling data, and the last set of combined survey results conducted in 2018 suggested 0.7% of the population were problem gamblers.”

Although this statistic points to a relatively low figure, Rhodes expressed the desire to cultivate better data in the future to acquire a better picture of the statistics.

He also said better data was imperative for the Commission and operators to make better decisions – especially in the current context where many people are already “falling through the cracks.”

He said, “In our casework recently, we saw one example where a customer lost £60,000 in just two weeks, and it was only then that the operator intervened. We found that no checks had been conducted prior to this point to assure the operator that the funds were legitimate, or event that the customer could afford it.”

Rhodes used another case to make a similar point, saying, “There was also a case where a customer lost £98,000 in five months without the necessary evidence being gathered to show this level of gambling was affordable to the customer.”

His evaluation of the industry was not all negative; however as he said that the 2019 industry challenges “led to better standards on VIPs, use of ad-tech online and games design.”

This brief positive interlude, however was soon followed by a reassertion of his original point that the Gambling Commission will not wait until the publication of the whitepaper to take action.

His closing remarks were: “No one in the gambling sector should believe that the Gambling Commission will accept waiting for the White Paper as an excuse not to tackle problems now. We don’t accept that; we don’t accept that anything should come before making sure you are trading as fair and as safe as possible. All the rest should be secondary.”

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