Legal View: What does the political future hold for gambling operators?

Tom Watson’s announcement that he would stand down as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and MP effective from general election day on 12 December 2019 brought slight festive cheer to gambling operators, but any celebrations were short lived as The Labour Party has confirmed it will maintain its long-standing opposition to the remote gambling industry in the UK. If the Labour Party is elected there will be many MP’s urging it to carry through its promises.

In November 2019, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) published its interim report into online gambling. The APPG is a cross parliamentary group of MPs which is funded, in part, by land-based gambling operators and chaired by Carolyn Harris MP (Labour). It’s worth noting that, unlike the ongoing House of Lords Select Committee enquiry into the social and economic impact of gambling, the APPG is not an official body of parliament.  Its interim report and recommendations caused quite a stir when it was published and online gambling operators’ shares nosedived.

Despite not having heard from the Gambling Commission beforehand, the APPG report was highly critical of the Commission, telling it to “urgently improve its standards in the area of online gambling”.  This seemed a particularly unfair criticism of the regulator, given that it can only regulate in line with the Gambling Act 2005, which the APPG concluded is “analogue legislation in a digital age and in need of urgent revision”.

The APPG’s other recommendations raised eyebrows, often because they were not based on fact.  For example, the APPG concluded that the recent reduction in stakes on FOBT in betting shops to £2 should be implemented for online casinos, while ignoring the fact that there are no stake limits on land-based casino table games.  Other recommended measures, such as affordability checks, incentive and VIP account restrictions, marketing restrictions and banning the use of credit cards are already high on the agenda for the regulator and the industry.

All of the main political parties have now published their election manifestos, which contain proposed measures to regulate online gambling.

The Labour Party intends to:

• Curb gambling advertising in sports
• Introduce a new Gambling Act fit for the digital age (wonder where that wording came from?)
• Establish gambling limits (rather vague!)
• Introduce a levy for problem gambling funding (presumably this means a mandatory levy); and
• Introduce mechanisms for consumer compensations (it’s not really clear what this actually means)

The Liberal Democrats intend to:

• Introduce a compulsory levy to fund research, education and treatment of problem gambling
• Ban the use of credit cards for gambling
• Restrict gambling advertising; and
• Establish a Gambling Ombudsman

The Conservatives will:

• Review the Gambling Act, which is “an analogue law in a digital age”
• Focus on loot boxes and credit card misuse
• Tackle gambling addiction
• Make the UK the safest place in the world to be online

So, there we have it, strong proposals from parties that are unlikely to be elected and relatively weak and vague proposals from the Tories.  With Boris Johnson currently riding high in the polls and betting markets predicting that the Tories will win the election outright, I envisage that overhauling gambling legislation will not be a priority, given the complexities of exiting the EU.  The Tories make no promise to repeal the Gambling Act 2005 and to put a new system of gambling legislation in its place and as we all know, a “review” of legislation can often lead to no change at all.