To begin his participation in ICE Barcelona, ​​the Executive Director of the British Gambling Commission, Andrew Rhodes, referred to how he finds the gaming sector in Great Britain currently.

“The most recent industry statistics were released in November, and we have seen that gambling in Great Britain has reached the highest Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) we have ever seen: £15.6 billion. And with four waves of official statistics for participation from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB), we are continuing to see a stable four week participation rate of 48 percent. I’ll touch on the GSGB further later on, but this most recent industry data allows us to ask some questions. If participation remains pretty static and at what is a high level, then if some products grow it is at least possible that could be at the ‘expense’, if I can put it that way, of other products. So, depending on how you see it, there will be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ from these movements, which reflect the market activity of some 22.5 millions consumers in Great Britain (GB)” he said.

And added that "In Great Britain at least, has often weathered economic downturn pretty well, but we have not really seen that consumer staking necessarily tracks in line with inflation. For example, we have not seen evidence that if inflation rises to 10 percent that someone’s normal £10 or £100 bet becomes £11 or £110. If you did expect staking in gambling to track with inflation then you would need to overcome that inelasticity – margins, return to player ratios, offers and other things can be changed, but the consumer is always able to decide how much they want to stake – it is not like buying other consumable goods where the consumer simply has to pay more to get it.”

The numbers 

Based on statistics from the Gaming Commission, Rhodes explained that “When we look at the latest industry statistics, that we published in November 2024, the picture gets bigger again and some things stand out as we go into 2025. For the first time large society lottery sales have passed the £1 billion mark, as they continue to grow, which is a consideration around the National Lottery. Whilst not regulated as gambling, we are also seeing how big participation in prize draws have become in terms of consumer participation. Bespoke questions we added to the GSGB recently tell us participation in prize draws now sits only a little behind betting as an activity, and well ahead of a number of other activities.”

And Added “Discussions with operators are showing a widening out of the sports offering in particular, with sports beyond the traditional horseracing and football growing in use, such as cricket, basketball, NFL and a host of other US-based sports. This smooths the seasonality of gambling to some extent and we will need to see what this does to the overall peaks and troughs in participation. We see some much higher peaks of consumer engagement in horseracing around big marquee events, with some data specialists telling us they expect to see higher bets-per-minute thresholds in the year ahead, which might suggest that peak demand is increasing. Again, as I have said – if consumer spend flattens out across a broader range of products for sports betting, then other products may well decline in participation. We will have to see how these patterns continue”.

Gambling Act Review White Paper

“In April it will be two years since the UK Government at that time published its Gambling Act Review White Paper. And at the Gambling Commission we have been working hard to implement the recommendations that it laid out. Whilst the UK went through a General Election last year that resulted in a change of Government, we have not seen a particular political change to the fundamentals to the Government direction on the regulation of gambling and our Government Minister, Baroness Twycross, stated her support for continuing the implementation of those recommendations and gave everyone her view on the path ahead in late 2024.” Rhodes explains.

But he regrets that “ the gambling ecosystem is unfortunately not just made up of those who wish to trade and play in the licenced, legal sector. It is one thing setting the direction for the licenced market. It is quite another to do so for illegal gambling. And that is why over the last year or so, those of you who pay attention to what we at the Gambling Commission are saying will not have missed us increasingly talk about how we are looking to frustrate those operators who are not licenced. Operators who are not regulated and who are often more likely to either cheat those people who choose to gamble with them or leave them open to higher risks of harm”.

Illegal gambling

Rhodes reflected on the problem of illegal gambling and highlighted that “In Great Britain, there has always been an illegal presence, but awareness and the nature of it has changed. Our aim is to prevent the illegal market from operating at scale in Great Britain. A significant part of our strategy in doing that is to target our efforts as far upstream as we can – at the level of hosts, payment providers, software providers, search engines and others. We have spent the last two years in particular not just targeting illegal activity but also building our own resources, skills and capabilities. Since the start of the Financial Year, our team has issued over 770 cease and desist, and disruption notices - this includes 262 cease-and-desists issued to operators and 205 to advertisers”.  

And added that “Over that same period the Commission has referred over 102,000 URLs to Google with 64,000 of these removed by the search engine, and 264 websites taken down. This is more than a tenfold increase in URL takedowns in comparison to the whole of 2023 to 2024”.

The Future

Looking forward, he explained that “The focus in 2025 for the Gambling Commission is obviously on the things I have already mentioned, and that was not an exhaustive list, but will also be on our statutory objective that gambling should be Fair and Open. This is an increasingly complex area as operators contend with large-scale identity misuse by organised gangs, more routine bonus abuse and multi-accounting as well as a range of other issues, including AI Know Your Customer (KYC) spoofing and so on. In this mix are customers who are not engaged in any of those activities but might have been caught by the efforts to prevent them. We have also seen some operators advising customers they are conducting checks or requesting information for ‘regulatory reasons’ or because the Gambling Commission require them to, when this is simply not the case whatsoever. We are considering what action we may need to take with these operators.”

Finally, he referred to the general panorama of gambling in Great Britain as we enter the year 2025 and highlighted that “Overall GGY is up and to the highest level ever. Participation is static at just under half the adult population engaging with gambling on a regular basis- Lotteries remain the largest area of participation with sales now for large society lotteries over £1 billion annually, but large prize draws, which are not regulated as gambling, have a very large presence in terms of participation and are just behind betting and far ahead of bingo and land-based casino- Online casino games have continued to grow in terms of market share -Consumer spend looks to be spread over a longer period of time and potentially a wider range of products, according to some operators”

An added that “The debate is tense and with a lot of work still to be done implementing the 2023 White Paper, perhaps that is to be expected”.