It has been nearly six years since the Social Market Foundation, a leftish think tank, came up with the brilliant wheeze of banning people from spending more money on gambling than they can afford. They proposed a £23 a week cap on gambling expenditure and said that anyone who wanted to exceed this “socially acceptable gambling budget” would have to prove that they were good for it. They did not explain how this would work in practice, but in a submission to the Gambling Commission in 2021, their gambling regulation spokesman, Dr James Noyes, said that the checks should be “non-intrusive” and “based on the data already held” by the company.
The idea of “frictionless affordability checks” was supported by the the Gambling Commission, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Gambling Related Harm, the House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Social and Economic Impact of the Gambling Industry and every anti-gambling group worth its salt, but it was a mirage. Background checks for County Court Judgements and past bankruptcies are insufficient to show whether a person is spending beyond their means. Customers can be phoned up and asked if they have an adequate income, but nothing compels them to tell the truth. When push comes to shove, you need bank statements and pay slips, but two-thirds of punters are unwilling to show these to a bookmaker.
And why should they? Gambling companies use all sorts of methods to identify problematic patterns of play and intervene with questions and advice, but they cannot look into their customers’ souls. If they ask too many questions, there are plenty of unregulated and offshore websites for punters to bet on. And since those websites do not pay tax, they often offer better odds. When General Betting Duty rises from 15 per cent to 25 per cent next year, “black market” sites will gain a further competitive advantage over the companies that are regulated by the Gambling Commission.
The Commission itself has been running a pilot for what it calls Financial Risk Assessments — affordability checks by another name — and plans to introduce “enhanced affordability checks” for anyone who spends more than £1,000 in 24 hours or more than £2,000 in any three month period, but the idea is now so widely loathed that it may be indefinitely postponed. Last week, Dr Noyes added his inexplicably influential voice to the chorus of critics. In a letter to the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, he said that he was concerned about the “inconsistent data, unclear outcomes and unnecessary friction” in the Gambling Commission’s pilot and that he was “particularly alarmed by reports that checks will prove unnecessarily burdensome to horse racing bettors, to the detriment of that sport”. Although he maintained that affordability checks were “a worthy idea in principle”, Noyes called for them to be put on hold. His intervention came a week after 400 trainers, owners, jockeys and politicians wrote an open letter to Nandy calling for affordability checks to be binned for good.
The policy now seems to have no friends outside of the Gambling Commission, but it is the Gambling Commission that can sign it off as early as next month. On Thursday, its Director of Major Policy Projects and Evaluation, Helen Rhodes, put out an indignant and defensive blog post in which she insisted that Financial Risk Assessments are not affordability checks and that there are “no proposals or plans to introduce affordability checks”. She claimed that nobody has been “driven to use illegal operators as a result of financial risk assessments” because nobody has been asked to hand over any personal information in the Commission’s pilot.
Affordability checks have been a reality for several years
This is technically true, but could still potentially mislead. As many punters know, affordability checks have been a reality for several years because the Gambling Commission has introduced them through the back door. Gambling operators have to navigate a web of licensing requirements, codes and “guidance” related to money laundering, counter-terrorism, safer gambling and “social responsibility” that can be weaponised by an activist regulator. Companies are told to have “processes” in place and to intervene in a “timely manner” if they spot “customers who are in a financially vulnerable situation” or see “significant unaffordable losses”. Affordability checks have never been a legal requirement, but companies are liable to be fined if they do not “adequately interact” with customers who gamble excessively. Since the Commission has never defined excessive spending, and adequate interaction is in the eye of the beholder, operators are constantly having to second-guess the regulator.
This doesn’t have to be a problem. Relying on good judgement and common sense can be a better approach than setting rigid rules and targets, but only if the regulator is equally pragmatic and behaves consistently. Instead, the Gambling Commission has enforced its “guidance” so arbitrarily and erratically that operators have been erring on the side of caution to cover their backs in case one of their big spenders turns out to be “in a vulnerable situation”.
Last year, Corbett’s, a small chain of bookmakers operating in Wales and the North-West, was fined £686,070 for “social responsibility failures” which included “failing to adequately interact” with a customer who lost £6,741 over ten weeks. In 2023, the Commission handed out a £6.1 million fine to an operator for failings that included “accepting a customer’s word that they earned £6,000 a month”. What is this if not punishment for not carrying out an affordability check?
Cases like this have created a chilling effect throughout the industry. The Gambling Commission can revoke licences and dish out unlimited fines. Faced with an existential risk and goalposts that are not so much moving as invisible, operators are limiting stakes and suspending accounts at the first sign of trouble. Officially, affordability checks do not exist. In practice, customers are being asked intrusive questions about their finances all the time, not because operators have genuine concerns about money laundering or funding of terrorism, but because they don’t know where the Gambling Commission will draw the line.
Punters are disgruntled. If, like me, you use the peer to peer betting platform Betfair Exchange, you will have noticed that the amount of liquidity in the market has collapsed in recent years. Overall gambling expenditure has fallen by 16 per cent in real terms in the last ten years and there is clear evidence of gamblers switching to offshore websites. The Gambling Commission has been ramping up enforcement and is proud of sending 3,140 Cease and Desist notices and reporting 339,757 website addresses to Google between April 2024 and June 2025, but this only shows the scale of the problem.
The more fundamental problem is the Gambling Commission itself which has become a magnet for moral reformers. Too many of its staff are opposed to the activities they are supposed to be regulating. The Commission has created a survey that exaggerates the number of problem gamblers, it has been funding anti-gambling activism, it was complacent about the black market until the problem became too big to ignore and it is continuing to defend affordability checks when even anti-gambling campaigners have admitted that they are counter-productive. It is the Gambling Commission, not ordinary punters, who need auditing.
