A new report of the National Audit Office (NAO) has revealed that the gambling regulatory body of the UK is failing to protect local players from becoming hooked on gambling. According to the information included in the report, the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) is not big enough to control and oversee the massive £11-billion gambling industry in the country.
The report has described the Commission as a small regulator, reminding it only has a budget of £19 million at its disposal to try and tackle the rapidly changing and highly dynamic sector. The Church of England has also labelled the regulator as chronically short of money and unable to deal with the dynamic environment in the industry.
According to the findings unveiled by the NAO in its latest report, the Commission is not successfully keeping with the pace of technological change, as it faces difficulties to recruit skilled staff to deal with cases regarding addictive online gambling sites and applications. The spending watchdog has also explained that the UKGC is still unable to fully understand how online and mobile gambling causes problem gambling.
The National Audit Office said in its latest report that the Gambling Commission has put making gambling safer as a paramount priority, but it was still not able to explain in detail what measures are set to be taken in order to achieve that.
NAO’s Report Says UKGC Is Constrained by Various Factors
According to the NAO, this approach of the gambling regulatory body to protect customers from harmful practices could mean that in some cases, the watchdog would need years in order to implement a certain change.
To illustrate that opinion, the National Audit Office reminded that it took quite a while to the UKGC to actually implement a change in the FOBTs maximum stakes of fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) that was found to be necessary back in 2013. However, it took five years to the competent authorities to take the necessary measures and actually reduce the machines’ maximum stake from £100 to £2.
In the past decade, the gambling industry in the UK has marked a £4-billion growth in real terms. The Commission, on the other hand, is allowed to ask for more funding every four years. Another problem is the fact that the UK gambling regulator has never unveiled what resources it needs in order to do its work. The last few years have seen the UKGC fine an increasing number of gambling operators, and the penalties imposed by the regulatory body in the 2018/19 period totalled £19.6 million.
According to the NAO, the Commission is constrained by a variety of factors that do not fall within the scope of its control, including lack of evidence on how development in the gambling industry affects local customers and the inflexible funding it gets.
- Author
Daniel Williams
