How the UK’s Gambling Act Reform Is Failing Consumers

Two years after the government published its long-awaited white paper on gambling reform, a gambling ombudsman still does not exist. The 2023 document, High Stakes: Gambling Reform for the Digital Age, committed to establishing an independent complaints body. Across two governments, nothing has happened on that commitment. It is a small detail. It is also a revealing one.

The 2005 Gambling Act was drafted before smartphones existed. Two decades on, the remote and online sector alone generated £6.5 billion in gross gambling yield in 2022 to 2023. The market did not wait for regulation to catch up. Regulation, it seems, is still waiting on itself. 

A Market Growing While Reform Stalled

Some 2.5% of UK adults, roughly one in 40, are currently dealing with gambling problems.

Of those, 76% report having used savings or borrowed money because of their gambling. These figures have not meaningfully improved through the reform period. The NHS saw a 34% increase in gambling disorder treatment presentations between 2019 and 2024, with the annual cost of gambling-related harm estimated at £1.2 billion.

Meanwhile, the market keeps expanding. Players making their own choices in the absence of stronger protections are met with a product offering that has grown substantially, by online-casinos.com’s selection of slot games. The catalogue has grown. The safeguards have not kept pace.

Affordability Checks: Diluted by Design

The centrepiece of consumer protection in the white paper was a system of affordability checks. The original framing was specific: players losing £1,000 within a day or £2,000 within 90 days would face mandatory financial risk assessments. Reform advocates treated these thresholds as the minimum viable intervention.

Researchers had already shown that even at those levels, fewer than 1% of high-spending gamblers had ever received a welfare call from their operator.

What emerged from the consultation process was considerably softer. By February 2025, operators were required to conduct financial vulnerability checks only at the level of £150 in net deposits over 30 rolling days. A passive, credit-reference-based screening in place of the active, income-linked assessment that campaigners had pushed for. The dilution contributed to at least one expert resigning from the Gambling Commission’s advisory group, citing advice that had “fallen on deaf ears.”

MPs pressing the government at the time of the white paper’s publication asked specifically for assurances that affordability rules would not be designed by the industry they were meant to constrain. The assurances were given. The consultation process that followed, under sustained industry pressure, produced a different outcome.

Advertising: The Fight the Government Refused to Have

On advertising, the white paper was cautious before it was published. Gambling with Lives argued that a total ban was the only meaningful way to reduce gambling-related deaths. MPs argued the white paper did not contain enough measures to tackle advertising.

What followed was incremental.

The Premier League’s code of conduct phases out front-of-shirt betting sponsors by 2026, while logos remain permitted on sleeves and advertising boards. Shirt fronts cleared. Everywhere else is retained. Cross-party lawmakers argued in 2026 that Britain risks falling behind other jurisdictions, pointing to industry advertising spend estimated at between £1.25bn and £2bn annually, and alleging operators regularly breach their own voluntary codes.

Voluntary codes. The phrase does a great deal of work in this policy area. Industry self-regulation has been the default since 2005. The white paper largely kept it that way.

A Regulator Without the Resources to Regulate

The National Audit Office found that the Gambling Commission had insufficient capacity to regulate the industry even before the white paper expanded its responsibilities.

Enhanced powers on paper require enforcement capacity to mean anything in practice. A regulator that is systematically outgunned is not, in any meaningful sense, a regulator.

The people who designed the 2005 Act trusted a fast-growing, highly profitable industry to police itself. The people who designed the 2023 white paper consulted that same industry extensively, accepted its timetables, softened its most contested provisions, and called it reform. 

The families who have lost someone to gambling harm did not get a seat at that table. They rarely do.