Can UK gambling affordability checks ever be truly frictionless?
A fresh intervention from shadow gambling minister Louie French has pushed financial risk assessments back to the centre of the UK gambling debate, with the Gambling Commission insisting its pilot shows the checks can be targeted and frictionless.
MP warns checks risk losing public trust
The Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup said the proposed system risked becoming too intrusive for ordinary bettors. Writing on 13 May, Louie French, the shadow gambling minister, said the test for any new regulation should be simple: “does it actually work, and does it make people’s lives better?” He argued that the case for an additional layer of financial checks had not yet been made.
The latest row is not about whether operators should intervene when customers show signs of harm. On that, there is little disagreement. The dispute is about whether the Gambling Commission’s planned Financial Risk Assessments, or FRAs, can be delivered in the way ministers promised when the 2023 White Paper was published: in the background, without document requests, and without pushing customers away from licensed firms.
“The Gambling White Paper promised frictionless checks, and Ministers have repeated that commitment,” French wrote. He added that customers were told there would be “No hassle. No ordinary punter being asked to hand over private documents just to enjoy a bet.”
That is now the industry’s central line of attack. The Betting and Gaming Council has argued that, however the checks are designed, public perception could be enough to damage the regulated market. An 8 April YouGov poll for the trade body found that 65 per cent of betting customers would be unwilling to provide documents such as bank statements or payslips to continue betting.
BGC chief executive Grainne Hurst said: “Forcing punters to hand over bank statements isn’t ‘frictionless’, it’s intrusive and will drive customers to the illegal market, where there are no safeguards at all.”
French made the same point: if customers feel they are being excessively monitored for a legal activity, he said, trust in the system begins to erode. “That is not a light-touch safeguard it is intrusive, confusing and completely out of proportion to having a legal flutter,” he wrote.
Commission says the pilot has changed the evidence base
The Commission’s response to industry concerns, set out most clearly by executive director Tim Miller at the Ethical Gambling Forum on 28 April, is that much of the criticism misunderstands the proposal.
Miller argued that the current system is already producing intrusive outcomes because operators use inconsistent approaches and, in some cases, ask customers for documents. “In 2026, it can’t be right that this still leads to some operators asking consumers to share bank statements and other financial documentation,” he said. “Such an approach is outdated, inconsistent and disproportionate.”
The regulator’s case is that FRAs would replace that patchwork with a more standardised, credit-reference-based process aimed at high-spending accounts where financial difficulty may be present. Miller was explicit that the checks were not intended to decide what an individual can afford to lose.
“The proposed thresholds for an assessment are not limits or caps on customer spend,” he said. “They are not ‘affordability checks’ by a different name – the checks we have been piloting will not even attempt to make an assessment of what each customer can afford to gamble.”
The numbers from the pilot are the strongest part of the Commission’s argument. Miller said fewer than 3 per cent of active customer accounts would trigger operator steps under the proposals. Of those, the pilot showed 97 per cent would receive a frictionless assessment. He said only 0.1 per cent of active accounts would require an assessment but be unable to complete it frictionlessly, around one in 1,000 accounts.
The Commission also says the pilot identified a real risk cohort. Miller said customers in the pilot were “between twice and four times more likely to have a debt management plan” and “between twice and five times more likely to have a default in the last 12 months” than comparable consumers.
For the regulator, that goes to the heart of the matter. “If anything, through the pilot for Financial Risk Assessments, we now have more evidence that makes clear the status quo can’t hold,” Miller said.
Privacy, racing and the black-market question
The legal basis for data sharing has been part of the debate since before the White Paper. In a July 2023 letter to UK Finance, the Information Commissioner’s Office (the UK’s data protection regulator) said: “It is our view that the GDPR does allow credit reference agencies to share personal information with gambling operators for the purposes of enabling financial risk checks.”
But the Information Commissioner’s Office also stressed limits: the information shared, it said, “must be limited to what is necessary”, and gambling operators must safeguard any extra data they receive.
That is unlikely to settle the commercial concern. Racing and betting operators have long warned that even a small amount of friction among higher-value customers could have an outsized effect on revenues, especially at a time of higher taxes and sharper competition from unlicensed sites.
Miller acknowledged the illegal market risk, noting that the Commission had received GBP 26m (€29.9m) over three years to step up enforcement. In 2025-26, he said, it issued 741 cease-and-desist notices, reported 397,527 URLs to search engines and disrupted 1,134 websites.
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