Bacta Annual Convention - Andrew Rhodes speech
28 November 2025
This speech was delivered by chief executive Andrew Rhodes at the British Amusement Catering Trade Association Annual Convention on 27 November 2025.
Please note: This is the speech as drafted and may slightly differ from the delivered version.
Hello everyone, thank you for that introduction. It’s been an important week for all of you and the sector more widely. I know you have heard from the Minister this morning. Thank you for giving me your attention this afternoon as well. I also want to thank Joseph and the team at Bacta too for having me back. We’ve had some really positive engagement with Joseph since he started as President, building on what was already a very constructive relationship that we had with John and the team previously.
I want to focus today on how we can continue to work together towards better outcomes wherever possible, for consumers and the industry.
I’ll briefly touch on yesterday before moving on to where the sector is today and what that means for our approach.
The importance of compliance at the earliest opportunity and how we want to work in collaboration with you to deliver that.
I’ll briefly update on our work to implement the Gambling Act Review as well.
But I think it would be strange to start anywhere but yesterday’s news from Government, so let’s start there.
Yesterday’s Budget is actually for me personally, the first time in many years that a budget has had such significant meaning and that there has been so much build up for the area that I have been working in. Certainly yesterday we saw some very significant changes in taxation levels in several areas and we will start to see what impacts that may or may not have.
As that starts to take shape, I am pleased that the effectiveness of the Commission on illegal gambling has been recognised by the Treasury with an additional £26 million over the next three years. Put that in context, that's something like a 9 fold increase in the money we have to fight illegal gambling. In my 20 years on executive boards of public bodies I've never known that kind of multiple from the Treasury ever before.
For the first time, this really will allow us now to invest a lot more specifically in addressing land-based illegal gambling. We have always been somewhat hamstrung by the size of our own resources, but this will give us a capability now to do a lot more in the land-based space than we've been able to do before. I'm sure we won't get universal coverage of that, but I think there's a lot more we will now be able to do.
With so much change still coming for the gambling sector, knowing the scale and shape of it is as important as ever. The publication then, this week of our industry statistics is a timely update. Our industry statistics detail the size of the market in both financial terms but also, maybe more interestingly for us today, in the scale of its bricks and mortar up and down the country – how many premises there currently are.
What we published on Tuesday states that in terms of Gross Gambling Yield (GGY), the industry as a whole, retained £16.8 billion in the year to end of March 2025. £4.8 billion of that was from land-based sectors, including arcades, betting, bingo and casinos. And in terms of how may premises there are:
8,234 - Total number of premises in Great Britain
Of that the total number of Adult Gaming Centres (AGC) was 1,415
In comparison there are 5,825 betting shops in total.
Whilst the GGY figures – both remote and non-remote - are showing increases on the year before, it’s worth noting that the total number of premises is showing a modest decline and AGC premises are slightly down by 36 premises in total across GB. This is quite different to the story we sometimes hear in parts of the media.
And these premises numbers are from the 2,179 gambling operators licensed in the GB market – itself a slight decline on the year before too. These figures paint the picture of a dynamic and competitive industry. One that sees the bricks and mortar economy still having a large and important role.
This time last year Tim Miller came and spoke to you about some of the things we had discovered during a series of assessments in the sector. That has led to a lot of good work this year and I want to come back to that later. But earlier this year, the Commission wrote to all adult gaming centre licensees to remind them of their obligations around self-exclusion.
Unfortunately, despite the warnings, some operators weren’t taking their responsibilities seriously. So at the start of this month we announced that we had taken decisive regulatory action. Seven AGC operators have seen their operating licences immediately suspended this year for failing to be part of a self-exclusion scheme. While most of those licences have since been reinstated following clear steps to remedy failings, all operators concerned remain under investigation, which may result in further regulatory action being taken.
Why do I raise this? Well, nobody wants to see negative headlines and a point that I've made many times is that the media coverage often implies that one case or one example is indicative of the industry or sector as a whole. You know, this may be unfair, but it is the reality. A conversation I had in Blackpool made the point: AGCs and Family Entertainment Centres, this is 2 per cent of the overall gambling industry. What percentage of the media stories is it?
The action that we take - and we've actually undertaken some 13 suspensions across the whole industry in the last few months - it's not just to protect consumers, it's also to protect you. All of you who are making investments and making an effort to deliver high standards should expect to see the regulator take action against those who don't. Those who fail to do what they're required to do. They're not just letting their customers down, they're letting you down and they're leaving you open to criticism as a whole sector.
Compliance at the first opportunity is what we are interested in though. Where we have to take enforcement action to bring this about we will, but often we can achieve this more quickly in other ways. And that is why we put such value in looking for ways to work with industry. So whilst there have been tough actions we’ve needed to take this year, we’ve also been able to work with Bacta and many of you here today to raise standards through other means. So once again this year we were able to speak at the Bacta SR Exchange event in Leeds – an event, set up by your trade body entirely aimed at helping you stay compliant with the Commission’s rules and make gambling safer for your customers. That is exactly what we want to see. And we were also really pleased with the engagement and cooperation we had with Bacta and many of you earlier in the year as we held workshops going over the findings from last year’s assessments.
Having a relationship where we can work with you on the challenges in the sector is vital if we are to keep on making gambling safer, fairer and crime free. And that goes for our work to implement the Gambling Act Review as well.
As everyone in this room will know, at the start of the year we launched a consultation on Games Machines, including the Technical Standards for them. We had already been really pleased with the pre-consultation engagement we’d had with the sector. With over a 1000 responses, it's fair to say we have been really pleased with the response to the consultation itself too. That level of response to what was of course quite a technical consultation is taking time to work through.
In terms of where we are and what we’re seeing in responses though:
There is general support for the proposals to consolidate the existing 12 Gaming Machine Technical Standards (GMTS) into a single standard, update them for greater clarity and also to update the GMTS and Gaming Machine Testing Strategy to remove obsolete material.
The proposals where we received the most comment are in relation to staff alerts which was considered to be technically very difficult to do with multiple machine makers using different protocols and displaying net position and elapsed time in one click.
We are making progress with our Board on this. But I want to reassure you that when we do publish next steps in this area, they will be measured, and any changes will look to take implementation step by step and as with all our consultations, we will have taken your feedback on board.
As the old saying goes, we are cursed to live in interesting times. The debate around gambling has probably never been more lively. I genuinely believed, wrongly, after the White Paper it might actually calm down a bit after the long gestation period for the White Paper. I was wrong about that. And if anything it has intensified, some arguments are being relitigated.
At the Commission what we’re interested in is continuing to work with you to deliver compliance at the earliest opportunity. To listen, to be open and to communicate exactly what our concerns are and to work constructively with both individuals and trade bodies, and that's the basis in which we're trying to do things. We think we make good progress, but there's always going to be more that we're going to want to do.
Thank you again and I look forward to your questions.
Last updated: 28 November 2025
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