"The UK gambling regulator has an unacceptably weak understanding of gambling harm"

According to the Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) and the Gambling Commission it oversees have an "unacceptably weak understanding of the impact of gambling harms and lack measurable targets for reducing them." "The Gambling Commission has no key performance indicators and the departmental leadership lacks urgency to address this."

In a report published Sunday 28 June 2020, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee says the Gambling Commission is not proactively influencing gambling operators to improve protections, and consistently lags behind moves in the gambling industry. Where gambling operators fail to act responsibly, consumers do not have the same rights to redress as in other sectors.

The commission insisted it had tightened player protection measures, the BBC reports.

However, it added: "We accepted before the Committee that there is always more to do and we are carefully considering the findings of their report to see what other additional steps we can take."

The PAC's report also criticized the approach to preventing problem gambling.

It said: "The government has approached other public health issues on the basis that prevention is better than cure," said the report by the committee, which scrutinizes the value for money of government projects.

"However, the department was unwilling to accept the premise that increasing the commission's budget to prevent harm would be preferable to spending on treating problem gamblers."

It compared the £19m in license fees the Gambling Commission gathered in the 2019 financial year with the industry's £11.3bn revenues.

The gambling industry itself spends £60m in treating problem gamblers.

The committee says there are about 395,000 problem gamblers who bet compulsively in the UK. A further 1.8 million people are "at risk" of becoming addicted to gambling, it says.

"The effects can be devastating, life-changing for people and whole families, including financial and home loss, relationship breakdowns, criminality and suicide," said the report.

MP Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, said the commission needed to be reformed.

"What has emerged in evidence is a picture of a torpid, toothless regulator that doesn't seem terribly interested in either the harms it exists to reduce or the means it might use to achieve that," she said.

"The commission needs a radical overhaul: it must be quicker at responding to problems, update company license conditions to protect vulnerable consumers, and beef up those consumers' rights to redress when it fails."

A DCMS spokesperson said: "We are absolutely committed to protecting people from the risks of gambling-related harm and recognize there is more to do.

"We have been clear that we will review the Gambling Act to ensure it is fit for the digital age."

Industry group the Betting and Gaming Council said its members had introduced voluntary measures to help spot and help gamblers suffering from addiction.

It said these included advertising restrictions, cooling-off periods on gaming machines, monitoring play and spending, and restricting and closing hundreds of thousands of accounts with new ID and age verification checks.

See the full report here.