Affordability checks in gambling need a rethink when even proponents are calling for pause

James Noyes, one of the initial proponents of affordability checks for gamblers, has issued an urgent call for a pause in their implementation. Stuart Andrew MP, the gambling minister in the last government and also a former supporter of checks, agrees with him. The British Horseracing Authority has suggested that implementation could cost the industry £250m annually in revenue as punters refuse to supply personal financial information to gambling operators and shift to the unregulated black market instead.

At a board meeting scheduled for Thursday, the Gambling Commission is expected to ignore the rising tide of concern and rubber-stamp the formal introduction financial risk assessments, as the Commission calls them. Tens of thousands, conceivably hundreds of thousands, of punters with licensed UK firms could soon be required to provide documentation on salary or assets before they can continue to gamble, despite initial promises – from Andrew, among others – that the process would be frictionless for all but a minority.

It is a moment of considerable threat for Britain’s racing industry, with the potential to inflict irreparable damage if punters stop betting or turn to the black market. This is despite evidence from the Gambling Commission’s annual surveys that betting on racing is one of the safest gambling products on the market. Noyes has been clear that online slots and casino games – several times more likely to be associated with problem gambling – were always intended to be the main target of checks when the concept was initially proposed.

The how and why of the journey to this point is extended and not a little confused and racing should accept at least a little of the blame. Since the Blair government’s Gambling Act in 2005, which legitimised £100-a-spin roulette machines in high-street betting shops, fixed-margin gaming has steadily grown to dominate the gambling conglomerates’ balance sheets. Online gambling has also grown to dominate the sector, allowing operators to cross-promote casino and slots, which carry zero risk for the operator, to customers who were recruited via racing and sports betting.

They have also driven thousands of punters to the black market by restricting their bets or closing their accounts. While this was going on for much of the past 20 years, racing, for the most part, simply looked the other way.

In addition to the history, it is also important to remember why checks were proposed in the first place. Problem gambling can have devastating consequences for addicts and those around them. Research has shown that 40% of gamblers with a Problem Gambling Severity Index score of 8 or above – indicating a high level of risk – report experiencing at least one “severe” consequence of their gambling, including relationship breakdown or committing a crime, over the previous 12 months. At the same time, just 20% in this group have sought help from gambling support services in the same period.

The intention of checks is to identify those who are at the greatest risk of harm and ensure, wherever possible, they get the help they need. Reducing the figure of 80% who do not seek help is an urgent priority and no form of gambling – even the weekly lottery draw – is entirely safe.

But a problem with checks from racing’s perspective is that they are triggered solely by spend, with no additional markers such as frequency or duration. This might, conceivably, be appropriate for repetitive, fixed-margin gaming, but it is wholly inappropriate as a measure of possible harm in betting, which has an entirely different profile in terms of profit, loss and participation. Checks designed for gaming products will, almost by definition, produce significant numbers of false-positives when applied to betting.

The gambling industry has been doing its best to blur the division between gaming and betting for decades. The “B” in FOBTs, the machines that turned betting shops into casinos, stands for “betting”, when nothing could be further from the truth. Again, racing played along with this for years, until the recent – successful – campaign to see off the harmonisation of gambling taxes forged a new and positive alliance between the sport and many leading campaigners for gambling reform.

You would hope the Gambling Commission would appreciate the structural differences between betting and casino gaming. Yet a nagging concern throughout this very extended process, which started during the last government and seems set to conclude two years into the next, has been the extent to which the regulator has the necessary grasp of the issues and potential consequences or the ability to change course if required.