In a keynote speech given at the Westminster Media Forum in April 2025, the Campaign for Fairer Gambling’s Dr James Noyes called for a new Gambling Act if the UK Government continues to delay rolling out reforms. The conference was attended by officials from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Business and Trade, the Northern Ireland Department for Communities, HMRC and Ofcom.

Below is a full transcript of the speech:

–

Good morning.

It is a pleasure to have been invited to speak with you today about the question of reform.

I’m sure that most of us will agree that the campaign for reform proved itself to be an influential factor in the UK Government’s decision to review the 2005 Gambling Act, and has continued to influence setting the framework and narrative in terms of public and political opinion.

Today I would like to talk a bit about how that framework has translated into actual legislative change, and, following the White Paper, where the reform movement might next be headed.

The first point to make about the case for reform is this. The debate today is about the Review of the 2005 Gambling Act. But we should not forget that initially, the reformers called not for a review of the existing legislation but for a whole new Act. In 2019 the Labour Party, then in opposition, pledged that “the next Labour Government will introduce a new Gambling Act, fit for the digital age”. The was echoed across the political spectrum.

And a year later, two reports were published that reiterated the fact that the existing rules and regulation were not fit for purpose. In 2020, the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee published reports that were scathing of both the Gambling Commission and DCMS, and made a series of specific recommendations.

The Public Accounts Committee report said that DCMS and the Commission had an “unacceptably weak understanding” of gambling harm”. “The collection of evidence has been patchy,” it said, “the pace of change has been slow and penalties on companies… are weak.” The report concluded that “there is a sense of complacency from the department in tackling this issue.” Even “more unacceptable,” it said, “it is not possible to judge the efficiency of the Gambling Commission against its stated objectives”, as the Commission “has no key performance indicators”.

The Government response to this report agreed that “more can be done to proactively influence the industry”. But then it shifted the framing, to talk of a “more collaborative approach,” working “collectively on finding credible solutions to specific problems”. It used the development of the Single Customer View scheme as an example of such collaboration.

Another example of this “collaborative approach” was the introduction of the Commission’s “special measures” scheme whereby an operator that had breached its licence conditions could, instead of having that license revoked, be given an opportunity to demonstrate change through what the Commission calls “voluntary willingness”.

In response to the criticism that the Commission “has no key performance indicators,” a new Finance and Performance Board Committee was set up, reviewed by an external body between 2022 and 2023, which found five areas effective or partially effective, and five areas in need of improvement. The external review was then concluded.

And in terms of the other criticisms made by the Public Accounts Committee, the Commission said that these would “fall within the scope of the Government’s review of the Gambling Act”.

In other words: the previous government decided, in response to Labour’s call for a new Act and the criticism from a key select committee, to launch a review of the existing Act, to make it “fit for the digital age”, and promoted a framework of industry collaboration, voluntary willingness and, to a degree, self-regulation. And the White Paper was presented as being a conclusion to the case for reform.

The question today is: did that approach, and the White Paper, succeed in its aims?

If the answer is “no”, then we can only conclude that the previous Government’s review of the 2005 Gambling Act has not been a success and that, going forward, an alternative approach should be considered by the new Government.

I am conscious that time is limited, so I’ll try to be quick as I run through some of the main issues at stake that might help us answer that question.

First, for the collection of evidence, and the accusation that DCMS and the Commission have had an “unacceptably weak understanding” of gambling harms, I am sure that most of us will be familiar with the confusion around changes to the official harm statistics.

Previously, the statistics were collated as part of the NHS Health Survey. But for the past two years, a new set of statistics from the Gambling Commission, called the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, has been introduced using an alternative methodology.

The result is that we now have two sets of competing statistics, both described as official (as one is from the health service and the other is from the regulator), with two different methodologies resulting in two different rates of problem gambling according to PGSI scores. And to confuse matters even more, when the Commission’s figures were released, they came with a caveat that they could not be used as a measure of addiction to gambling or to calculate an overall rate of gambling-related harm in Great Britain.

This confusion was apparent at last month’s Health Select Committee inquiry, where the Gambling Commission representative accepted that the new approach was “bedding in”.

It has also created uncertainty in terms of measuring harm prevention effectiveness. The new commissioner in charge of harm prevention under the statutory levy is going to be the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. But when OHID’s Deputy Director was asked by the Select Committee how it will “evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions”, he said that “the evidence base is somewhat limited. We will have to do a bit of learning as we go. This will be difficult in the early stages, but I hope that as UK Research and Innovation takes forward its research programme, more of those evidence gaps will be filled”.

I have to say, I find this frustrating. Over a year ago, the NHS’ Health Economics Unit was commissioned by GambleAware to model gambling harm in Great Britain. The Unit said that “gambling harm has a significant health, financial and societal impact. However, the prevalence of gambling harm in the UK is not well understood, making it difficult to plan and deliver important support and treatment services”.

It’s the same thing being said, year after year after year.

The Public Accounts Committee said in 2020 that the Government had a weak understanding of harm. The NHS Economics Unit said in 2024 that harm was still not well-understood. The Gambling Commission’s new survey suggests a better understanding of harm, but that it is still “bedding in”. Then at the Health Select Committee earlier this month, the Commission said it “hope[d] the introduction of the levy will allow us to have the comprehensive evidence base we need”.

The question of the evidence base keeps getting kicked further and further down the road. Even though the Government told the Public Accounts Committee back in 2020 that this question would be settled by the White Paper.

So when we ask the question, does the Gambling Commission have a better understanding of harm, as demanded by the Public Accounts Committee, or does the Government have the evidence needed to evaluate adequately prevention and treatment services, the answer is no.

A similar question could be asked about whether the White Paper successfully brought rules and regulations up to date, making the “analogue Act” fit for the digital age.

Clearly not, if recent events with the likes of Stake.com are anything to go by – when an operator used hybrid marketing techniques, including with a porn actress on social media, clearly in breach of ASA rules, and running its activity as a white label through the Isle of Man’s TGP Europe in order to advertise on the shirts of Everton Football club.

An article published in the Financial Times earlier this week showed how the use of crypto casino platforms like Stake is growing. Stake is no longer a legal actor in the UK market, but continues to be advertised on Everton shirts. The FT piece showed how consumers readily use VPNs to bypass blocks on these platforms, often guided by influencers on social media.

How does any of this show legislation “fit for the digital age”? In the White Paper, all the Government said in a rather vague way was that “cryptoassets must not become a vehicle for lower standards in the licensed gambling sector” and the Commission will “continue to monitor the development of new technologies and payment vehicles closely”.

What else can be added to the list? There is also the lack of a gambling ombudsman, even though the White Paper pledged to introduce an ombudsman capable of adjudicating disputes relating to social responsibility in 2023. The Government gave the task of creating an ombudsman to the BGC – in another gesture to industry “voluntary willingness” – and, like the other examples of self-regulation, things haven’t progressed as promised. The White Paper said that “if the ombudsman does not attract sufficient cooperation or deliver the protections as we expect, we will legislate to put its position beyond doubt”. Strong words. Yet two years on, nothing has happened.

One thing that has happened is the introduction of a statutory levy, something which is being discussed at the conference today.

Obviously I am pleased about the levy, having written a report making the case for it back in 2022. But this money has to be spent wisely. It is tens of millions of pounds. At a time of brutal government spending cuts and intense pressure on public services, it is a moral obligation on the Government, the NHS and the Gambling Commission that every penny of this £100m is accounted for and used in the most efficient way.

I say this because the whole point of the levy is that is must be categorically different from the inefficient and wasteful system that preceded it.

The previous system, which depended on voluntary contributions from the industry, as well as regulatory settlements in lieu of fines, was, in my view, a scandal – and responsible for a great deal of the uncertainty around evidence and research that I have talked about this morning.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds was spent on research projects with minimal peer review and impact assessment, let alone any rationale for the amount given.

It sometimes felt like a pot of gold being arbitrarily handed out by the Gambling Commission with almost no accountability.

The same goes for the fines handed out by the Commission. Why is it that for the same breach of LCCP, namely anti-money laundering and social responsibility rules, one operator is fined £6m, another operator makes a payment in lieu of a fine of £1.5m, and another operator is given a warning?

With the Gambling Commission, the rationale for fines is not transparent. Deadlines for investigations are self-imposed and there is essentially no external accountability. This clearly runs counter to the recommendation made by the Public Accounts Committee that the Gambling Commission should be judged against its stated objectives. The fact that some of this money paid in lieu of fines, already lacking in transparency, was then diverted into so-called regulatory settlements to fund research which, in turn, also had minimal transparency or accountability, is, as I say, nothing short of a scandal.

It is essential that the statutory levy represents a clear break with this previous system.

At the same time, the levy should not be seen as a panacea for everything else that the Gambling Act Review failed to do. At some point, the ball can no longer keep being kicked into the long grass. The levy exists to fund better research, prevention and treatment. It is not there to replace effective regulation, legislation or taxation.

At some point, the Government will have to make a decision about whether we can keep going on like this, putting sticking plasters onto a 20-year old Gambling Act which, it increasingly seems, has much deeper, inherent problems.

It is a fact that the 2005 Act’s licensing objectives – to be fair and open, free from crime, and to prevent harm – are still not being upheld. The white labels, the crypto casinos, the confusing stats on harm, the lack of an ombudsman, the flawed advertising rules, the clustering of adult gaming centres on deprived high streets – all these point to the fact that the White Paper did not adequately fulfil the stated aims of the review, or the criticisms of the Public Accounts Committee, or the many petitions and pledges made by politicians over the past few years.

And so we go back to what reformers, and Labour politicians in this current government, were saying five years ago: that if an analogue piece of legislation continues to prove unfit for the digital age, then the only reasonable and rational alternative left is to call for a new Gambling Act.

This would require looking at the question of gambling policy with a blank sheet, free of inherited assumptions, interrogating questions of primary legislation in a serious way, led by serious people, as we saw with the Budd Report in 2001. Revisiting the framing of the legislation, the premise of the licensing objectives, and future-proofing the regulation.

I would not be surprised if that is where the reform movement will start to be focused on in the months ahead: highlighting the flaws in the current situation, turning its focus on the work of the Gambling Commission, before then beginning a conversation which recognises that the recent review of the current Act did not fulfil its purpose, and that a new Act might in fact be needed.

I am sure that the reformers are aware of the scale of such an ambition. But I also know that they have the conviction, the resources and the people required to dig in for the long run, and make the case for it to happen.

Thank you.