Gambling Commission: We can’t fine our way to operator compliance

Gambling Commission (GC) executive director Tim Miller has said the regulator can’t rely on fines alone to improve compliance among operators.

Speaking on a webinar with Australian academics this week, Miller spoke openly about the role the GC has in the market and its future given the release of the white paper into the Gambling Act 2005 review.

When asked about the importance of fine and regulatory settlements in the regulator’s arsenal, Miller said that while they were important, they couldn’t be relied upon as a silver bullet.

Miller said: “In a perfect world, there’d be no need to fine because you’d have compliance at that first opportunity. Our hope is that many of the measures that come through the white paper will be preventative in nature.

“So, rather than waiting until harms are happening and the putting things in place to mitigate it, many of these measures will be designed to prevent those harms happening in the first place,” he added.

The GC has announced a slew of penalties this year, including a record settlement with William Hill, a £7.1m fine for Kindred and hitting out at Paddy Power for historic marketing failures.

Miller went on to state that the growing number of regulatory cases, and in turn the wider coverage of the GC’s approach, was stymieing compliance breaches from operators.

Miller said: “I don’t think we’re in a world where you’ll see financial penalties and fines disappear.

“I think [fines] grab the wider industry attention and often we have found some of the greatest changes that have happened have not come about necessarily in the operator that was subject to the regulatory action, but by others that are looking at what has happened.

“I think what gets overlooked in many of our decisions is that the fine is only part of it. The most effective part is where we’re requiring operators to take particular actions, [such as] commissioning a third-party audit,” he added.