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Consultation response

Changes to licence conditions and codes of practice on the use of credit cards for gambling

Consultation response January 2020

Published
14 January 2020

Last updated
16 March 2023 - Changes

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  1. Contents
  2. Proposal 2: Remove the requirement for licensees to report premise acquisitions and disposals

Proposal 2: Remove the requirement for licensees to report premise acquisitions and disposals

Proposal

We require licensees to inform us of any gambling premises they have acquired or disposed of within regulatory returns, which is currently entered on an address-by-address basis. Instead, we will monitor acquisitions and disposals via improved liaison with premises licensing authorities (such as local authorities), with an option for us to build a new digital service allowing licensees to self-log and maintain lists of premises with us in the future.

Consultation question

Question 2.2. Do you agree with the proposal?

Respondents' views

Almost all respondents supported this proposal, commenting that a separate digital service for reporting acquisitions and disposals of premises was preferable over the current approach. However, concerns were expressed with the reliability of licensing authority data and the potential delay between us stopping to collect acquisitions and disposals via regulatory returns and the introduction of a replacement digital service for this topic.

Our position

Based on feedback from licensees, we have determined that regulatory returns are not a satisfactory system for data on acquisitions and disposals of individual premises at an address level.

Licensing authorities have a statutory obligation to maintain a register of premises licences issued by them and to report to us any premises licences granted (or rejected). We work closely with licensing authorities to obtain this data to maintain a national register of gambling premises. We also receive copies of licence applications and related matters (for example disposals, variations etc.) directly from licensees, which we use to update the register. Combined, these sources of data give us a robust data set to understand where licensed gambling takes place.

We will still collect total numbers of active premises from licensees and, where we identify that these differ from the number of premises attributed to them on the national premises register, we will contact relevant licensees to ask them to reconcile or correct their data.

We intend to keep this approach under review and, if we find that it is not working, we will include licensee-maintained premises lists within our future suite of digital services.

We will deactivate premise acquisitions and disposals within the regulatory returns’ component of eServices on 31 October 2020.

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