Affordability checks were one of the most
controversial and hotly
debated measures during
the UK's gambling act review in 2022 and
2023, seen by some as a
simple tool to assess financial
risks to a player and by others as a
tyrannical invasion of privacy and
personal data. Nevertheless,
affordability checks were included as
part of the white paper as
suggested by the Social Market
Foundation in a series of reports and
recommendations. But now a senior fellow
of the SMF has rolled
back on his recommendation, asking the
government to pause the implementation of
affordability checks
over concerns they are not frictionless.
So why is there a change of
approach and what does this
tell us about the debate over gambling
reform? Welcome back to iGaming Daily
supported by OptiMove,
the creator of positionless marketing and
the number one player
engagement solution for sports
betting and iGaming operators. I'm
Charlie Horner and today I'm joined by
SBC Media's editor-at-large
Ted Mamure and SBC news editor Ted Orm
Clay. Ted M, how's
things? Very well Charlie,
glad to be back on our podline. Very
good, no it's good to have
you back and talking of good
to have you back Ted Oc, welcome back to
the show, how's things? Yeah
pretty good, thank you Charlie,
good to be back in the studio again
feeling refreshed after a
couple of days of annual leave
and yeah it's always good to come back to
a big news story to get stuck into.
Yeah a big news story it is as well and I
thought we'd left affordability checks
behind us a good couple of years ago Ted,
but it's back on the news agenda.
Let's have another history lesson Ted
because we all know that
you're a history professor here at
iGaming Daily, how did the idea of
affordability checks come
about in the UK and what has the
industry reaction been like over the last
few years? Okay I'm
going to try and summarize
affordability checks or kind of the
journey of affordability
checks as best as possible.
So the idea was seeded from the first set
of technical
concentrations of the Gaming Act Review
back in 2022 and in that kind of initial
consultation phase
DCMS asked stakeholders
for feedback on protection layers needed
to improve intervention
and to minimize the risks
of general consumers and gambling harms.
So on a technical level
what the UK Gambling Commission
put forward was its case to go forth with
affordability checks
right and this was viewed
as a measure that it had already begun to
revise under its wider
and kind of long-term policy
of creating a single view of gambling,
prevalence and activities
that's been kind of its long-term mandate
or its long-term
strategy during the 2020s.
Initially and straight from the off the
kind of technical mandate of
affordability checks
was opposed by numerous stakeholders that
we're going to get to, but
DCMS backed the idea as a
much-needed measure to modernize gambling
protections in the
smartphone era and gave the
Commission regulatory clearance to
proceed in 2023. So once they kind of
published its blueprints
there was kind of much lots of concerns
on the design and the
implementation but come August
2024 the UKGC launched its initial pilot
program which began on
checking customers on the threshold
of 500 pounds in that deposit, that was
phase one. Six months later in February
2025 it began phase two
in which it would really put its kind of
system in place of light
checks at an affordability level
of 150 pounds. Yet since then feedback
has been limited on the
measure and how the pilot has
progressed. Come to it in kind of 2026
and where we stand now there are many
points of concerns on
the technical application with pushback
focused on privacy, false
positives and actually the
overall practicality and there's a fear
now that we're leading the
consumers to share kind of
unwilling to share their data who might
kind of migrate towards
the unlicensed market.
And from the developments this week that
resistance appears to
have been hard as the
UKGC is told to put a pause on the
affordability checks experiments.
Yeah and we knew that this would have a
lot of detractors as I said
at the top of the show it's
quite a controversial measure. You can
see why certain
stakeholders within the industry and
from consumer groups might uphold was
affordability checks but it said OC. It
was quite surprising
that this week the issue of affordability
checks came back into the news this week,
particularly because of who it was who
was now voiced their
opposition to the measures. Could
you give a bit of background as to the
latest update and why
essentially we're talking about
this today? Right so as you as you
instead have just discussed Charlie the
topic of affordability
is quite a historic one in the UK. I mean
if anything it
predates the whole topic of
affordability checks you know when we had
the conversations
about banning credit card
transactions for gambling in the UK a
number of years ago.
Obviously it was a huge talking point
throughout the gambling ad review between
2020 and 2023. The reason
it's come back in the news
this week and as you mentioned why it's
quite interesting you
know that it has done the
circumstances around it is that the
person whose statement has re-raised it
is is James Noyes who
is from the Social Market Foundation the
SMF. The SMF is a think
tank which has been a very big
proponent of gambling law reform, of
regulatory reform in the
UK over a number of years.
As Ted mentioned it was a very active
voice during the gambling
ad review, a big proponent of
affordability checks which materializes
in the review is finance
risk checks, the government kind
of did a bit of a rebranding there. They
wanted to put it across as
something that would be very
frictionless and light touch. I believe
that the commission estimates
only about 0.1% of UK betters
will ever come up against these financial
risk checks. James Noyes
has now called for a pause
of them and a review as to how they're
working, the suitability of
them. It's you know given that
the SMF is a big proponent of these and
last year was a big proponent of
increasing UK gambling tax
they wanted to see the highest threshold
out of all the
proposed thresholds last year.
Given this this organisation's prominence
in these debates it's
quite interesting that he has
joined the various voices calling for a
review of them and a
potential pause of them.
This includes the likes of the British
Horse Racing Authority which
penned an open letter to DCMS
earlier this month co-signed by a number
of other stakeholders. Horse
racing was also one of the big
opponents of affordability checks during
the gambling ad review. I
think they were estimating
losses of something like 60 million a
year is what comes to mind from
affordability checks.
That was a figure that was often chucked
around around 2021-2022. So
yeah that's the reason it's
really interesting that it's come back to
the news this week as you mentioned
Charlie it's because of
who it is who has raised them. Although
we should also add that as
James Noyes pointed out in his
letter to the government this was his own
opinion not that of the
Social Market Foundation. He did
emphasise that in the letter. Yeah Ted M
I'll just throw it back over
to you now because that is a
significant voice to be vocalising their
opposition to
affordability checks isn't it?
It is it certainly is and I think here
we've got to kind of step
back and look at who the Social
Market Foundation are and how they brand
themselves and this is
a cross-party think tank
and in its mandate it looks through UK
policies in which it feels
that it can have an unbiased
impact and it can get kind of cross-party
consensus and move
forward and that was what
it believed on the Gavin review that it
should be toughened significantly
tightened in the interest
of the public and its protection the
protection of consumers.
Also that UK Gavin should face a
polluter charge and it actually supported
Gordon Brown or pitched
to Gordon Brown to support
the position of 50% tax on gambling. In
terms of James Noyes himself
I think he's kind of viewed
as kind of the intellectual kind of
figureheads in the reformist camp of how
gambling legislation should be reshaped.
He's not a prohibitionist,
he doesn't support a blanket
ban on advertising but what he does want
is much stricter
protections at the consumer level.
He wants to advocate for consumer redress
in terms of a gambling
ombudsman and not and I think part
of the reason why they backed the
affordability checks is because it's
going to kind of plug in
with what the SMF think should be the
wider scheme for UK gambling to get data
sharing practices or
a data shared scheme between the
operators and the UKGC as the big
technical goal of the review.
And Noyes wrote this, he aired his
opinion in an open letter to Lisa Nandy
who is the Secretary of State for Culture
Media and Sport which has
oversight of gambling in the UK.
What's the government stance on this?
Have we heard anything from
DCMS or the Gambling Commission
in response to Noyes' communications? Ted
O'See have you heard anything?
Not yet, no I don't think anything has
come out. I think we can
probably expect the government to
continue toeing the line that it has done
for a while. They wanted to
see the recommendations of
the Gambling Act review seen out.
Obviously that review was a really
lengthy process as we mentioned
earlier. It started in December 2020,
ended with the publication of
the white paper in April 2023
and the recommendations are still being
adopted. I don't really think the
government has much of an
appetite, especially with loads of other
considerations and priorities right now,
to really get stuck back into things like
that. The Gambling Commission has
reiterated a lot over
the past year or so that these financial
risk checks shouldn't be
considered affordability
checks in the same sense. They're meant
to be very light touch. I
think it's quite confident
that they are frictionless. However, it
did issue a statement sometime last year,
in September last year, where this was
part of a wider assessment it
was doing of looking at what
regulatory practices and what operator
practices might be causing the most
customer grievances.
And one of the things they did mention in
there was that financial
vulnerability checks could be
a regulatory practice that could drive
customers to unregulated
platforms perhaps, which was
something obviously the industry has been
arguing for some time. I
think the commission has
kind of recognized in the past the
potential drawbacks of
this measure, but overall
is quite confident in what they're doing
with it as one of the
flagship measures of the
Gambling Act review. I think you're going
to look at DCMS's
treatment and oversight of the
Gambling review and anytime it's asked a
direct question, especially in
affordability checks,
it just reverts back to its script of we
believe that the check
should be proportionate
and frictionless. And I think we're given
any cap. We could be
getting to an end of year where
we were told 2026 was the year of
application and implementation. And we've
now reviewed the levy
and affordability checks. I don't think
this department's filling its mandate.
Yeah, we don't want to open up old wounds
of the white paper or the
Gambling Act review, because
I think I can speak for all of us in the
entire industry when I say
we spent a little bit too long
reporting on that storyline. But Ted,
Ted, let's go to a quick
break and then we'll analyze
what this means and what we can glean
about the future. So
join us after the break.
Welcome back to iGaming Daily. Now, you
know I like to sort of exaggerate a
little bit when I write
the scripts for these things. So I like
to take two polar
opposites and then invite my
esteemed colleagues to add a little bit
of nuance. So I guess to
kick us off for this debate,
Ted M, what can we read into this
situation? Does this sort of damage the
credibility of those
reformists who wanted to implement these
affordability checks
only for them to roll
back on their ideas a few years later? Or
on the other hand, does it
show that they're sort of
empirical and data-led and follow the
evidence? No, I agree with
you. I think there is a bit of
damage there. And I think if you look at
the the SMF and the way
that they kind of pigeonholed
gambling and what they wanted and kind of
did lobby out the very
senior figures in parliament
to support their mandates. Now to have
that kind of, you know, to go back and
then we're now at the
kind of the technical phase of the
implementation of the key
measures of the gambling review.
And those of them seem to be progressing
and I don't necessarily
think that this is just the
fault of the UKGC. The pilot is there to,
you know, draft out or to
highlight the practicality
of putting this system in place. I think
part of the problem is that
affordability checks sounded
great on paper and we're now finding out
that the practicality is much
harder. And also that if you
we go back to consultation is that I
think that affordability
checks what kind of view there's
this kind of panacea to every issue on
the protection of the
general consumer. The focus
here should have been in a much bigger
kind of big data play,
data sharing, or just saying,
look, who do we think are the vulnerable
players? What are their
triggers? What are kind of like
the trends that we can see in play and
improve kind of oversight
there? I don't think that the
SMF presented kind of any alternatives
other than it's affordability checks or
the the gamma review
is trashed. Ted or C, come jump in here
if you want. Yeah, I think
it's hard to disagree with
Ted's point there, given the
affordability checks or financial risk
checks as they became in the
white paper were really the main thing
that the SMF was
calling for all those years.
Again, I guess it is important to
reiterate that James Noyes has stated
this is his opinion and
not that of SMF. Although, I mean, to a
lot of people it will be
hard to separate the two,
given his role in the think tank over the
past few years as well.
Yeah, it is a bit damaging to their
arguments. Obviously, it does
also come after not that long
after the whole debate about taxes last
year that I was mentioning
earlier in the SMF's role in that.
So I think a lot of gambling stakeholders
might be rolling
their eyes a bit at this.
Yeah, absolutely. Here's another point
that I guess would have
been brought up by many in
the industry during the consultation
periods and things like that.
This idea that affordability
checks would be fantastic if they were
non-intrusive, was that
always a little bit fanciful?
By the nature of these checks, there has
to be some friction,
right? Can they always be,
or can they ever be truly frictionless?
How can they not be intrusive, Ted or C?
Okay. So in the white paper, the main
thing that the Gambling
Commission was banking on,
no pun intended, apologies, was open
banking and the use of that
technology of those practices
as a way to seamlessly share data from a
customer, their banking
provider and the operator
without the need for customers to then be
directly handing over pay
slips and bank statements and
proof of income and things like that,
which a lot of personal
information that people wouldn't be
happy sharing with an operator or any
other third party really. I think they
really need to prove
that that can work properly to prove that
these are non-intrusive.
But again, to many people,
a bit like what you've just mentioned,
Charlie, to a lot of people, the notion
of sharing something
via open banking is still going to come
across as intrusive.
People are understandably very
protective and very cagey about sharing
financial information, personal
information, those sort of
details with anyone, whether it's a major
operator or not. It's a very
hard thing to prove, I think,
that they are going to be non-intrusive.
I guess the figure though
that the UK Gambling Commission
will hinge on quite a lot is the fact
that it only applies to a very, very
small fraction of people
who meet these thresholds. The battle
then is just this minority
of people whose thresholds,
who do meet the thresholds, how can you
prove to them that it's
going to be non-intrusive?
That's the big question here and it's a
really, really difficult one.
There's always been so many liabilities
on that transparency of who are that,
kind of 0.05% of people that are going to
be chased. The
Commission even with the pilot
program is yet to answer that. So we
haven't even seen it
transferred to a live environment.
Again, going back to that mistake where I
think what the
Commission fundamentally got wrong
was that it put all its basket, put a
significant amount of eggs
in the basket of affordability
shakes. That was a measure that was
transferred from its view
that it wanted this mandate to
create a single view of the player in
this decade. I think how it
just stepped up to that program
and said the affordability checks are
part of that remit, not of
the Gambling Review. I think
that there would have been better grounds
to test the long-term viability of
affordability checks
and how can you roll it out, how it's
going to be implemented over not
necessarily a period of
six months, but over a period of however
long it needed, two years, three years,
how to get it in by the end of the decade
and how to actually work
with UK finance on applying the
best checks. I think what we're learning
here and particularly over the
conversations that we've had
over the last week or so, Ted, is that
organisations just need
to talk to each other more.
But it seems like a very difficult task
bringing people into a consensus.
One outcome of this that I have thought
about is, is this a big win for the
industry and in particular
the BGC, the Better New Gaming Council?
Because over the last six
months on the show, we've maybe
taken a little bit of a not critical view
of some of the BGC's
actions, but we've questioned
their approach sometimes. But do you
think this is a win for the
industry and those who have long
argued that stringent measures would
ultimately send players to the black
market? Ted M, you're
looking a little bit curious on this one.
Do you want to take this
one first? Well, I mean, you
could say it's nice to say I told you so,
but it doesn't feel like a
win. And again, we're doing
about the BGC and that's another
organisation that's going through a
transition phase at the
moment, post gambling review, and that
it's kind of looking at the
next era of UK online gambling
and what part it plays in there. And I
think it's where
political sensitivities like, yes,
look, affordability checks might not work
out, but I think that
the BGC has to kind of
live in these political circles and isn't
going to rock the boat. I
don't think there'll be kind
of any cheers from their side. Ted or C,
do you think that this
whole story really is a case of
be careful what you wish for on the side
of the reformist side of the debate?
Perhaps, yeah. I mean, kind of relating
it to the question you just
asked that Ted has mentioned,
sorry, I'd imagine a few people in the
industry are feeling
vindicated, even though they won't
be very happy to be vindicated about
something like this as Ted alluded to.
There's always, the industry makes this
argument a lot and people
often talk down of it. And we
have said on the podcast before that we
think sometimes the
industry relies too heavily on
the black market argument against over
regulation, over taxation and stuff. But
yeah, there is always
that to consider the idea that if
something has brought in the
customers' reality badly too,
they will look elsewhere to find the
products that they want,
find the betting markets that
they want and so on. And those might be
provided by someone that is
unlicensed, isn't paying taxes,
isn't subject to the same player
protection standards and things like
that. And ultimately
that is more detriment of the customer
and the market. That argument
does have some merits to it.
And yeah, I think some people will
probably be feeling
vindicated by this. But ultimately,
this is just a statement from James
Noyes, just this is one
individual, this isn't
the the Gamba reform lobby at large.
There'll be a lot of
people who still have arguments
in favor of these checks. This and
coupled with some of the
feedback we've heard about the
new research education and treatment levy
and some of the
difficult transitions that have
come about through that. Yeah, there's
probably a few people who like Ted said,
will be thinking, we told you so. I think
it just really reflects
the complexities of some
of these things and some of the drastic
changes that we're seeing
in the industry throughout
this decade. I'm just wary that we're
running out of time, but Ted
M, I'll give the final word to
you. How do you think this whole debate,
because it is a debate and
as Ted also says, it's just
the voice of one person involved in this
debate, but it is something that's
rumbled on for a while.
How does this reflect on the governments
and multiple governments gambling
regulation strategy,
because this is an amalgamation of
stories that we've been
talking about over the period of,
I mean, you could say six months, you
could say five years.
It's a hard question to close today's
podcast on. I can only reflect on, and
I'll put this back to
Ted OC here. You can only reflect on what
you see. And again, this is
going back to how does DCMS
reply anytime it gets asked the question
about UK gambling
regulations, it just points back to the
gambling review and says that they're
waiting for the measures to be
implemented. And then they can
just point the UK, GC and say, Hey guys,
it's on you. And we're only
implementing the measures that
they wanted. It's reflective of other
markets. And I was actually
thinking about this today,
and following the levy, following the tax
fees that I think UK
gambling is on the platform and
it's waiting for a very, very slow train.
And all the poor times are saying
everything's delayed.
Not only delayed, but destination
unknown. You said it.
Yeah, I think that's a great place to
leave it. So thanks a lot,
Ted and Ted here in the studio
for joining me on this one today. And
thank you to OptiMove, our sponsor for
supporting the show.
And thank you to our audience for tuning
into today's episode of iGaming Daily.
And join us again tomorrow to keep up to
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