Lotteries Council Annual Conference 2026 - Ian Angus speech
21 May 2026
This speech was delivered by Director of Policy Ian Angus at the Lotteries Council Annual Conference on 21 May 2026.
Please note: This is the speech as drafted and may slightly differ from the delivered version.
Hello everyone, thank you for that introduction and thank you everyone for that welcome. I’m Ian Angus, Director of Policy at the Gambling Commission and it’s great to be with you today.
Society Lotteries play a vital role in our communities, raising important money for those charities and causes that otherwise may miss out. But lotteries are of course in law a gambling product and one that requires appropriate regulation to keep it safe, fair and crime free. And that’s where we at the Gambling Commission come in. We want to work with you to make sure you can run your lotteries safely and keep on raising money for your good causes and maintain the reputation of your charities and community organisations.
So today, I’ll be giving you a brief overview of what the latest statistics are telling us about how gambling and society lotteries like yours are doing, who’s playing and why. I’ll take you through our new Business Plan, what it means for you and what to look out for this year. As part of that I’ll dig into how we continue to develop our work to tackle illegal gambling and the latest developments elsewhere.
And finally I’ll return to how we want to continue to work with you over the coming year, prioritising collaboration in the spirit of compliance at the earliest opportunity and why this helps you and your good causes. So plenty to get our teeth into, starting with the stats.
And let’s start with participation, which we track through our Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) official statistics. The second GSGB annual report was published last October and it shows participation over a four-week period stable at 48 per cent of the adult population between January 2024 and January 2025. More recent quarterly releases – an advantage of the GSGB is we get quarterly data - show that was the same through to the end of October. At the same time, Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) for the whole sector hit a new high of £16.8 billion for April ’24 to March ’25. Again, we have now started releasing quarterly figures for our regulatory returns as well and between July and September last year, the sector as a whole made £4.3 billion in GGY.
When we look at lotteries only, those GGY figures show that £4.2 billion in GGY for April ’24 to March ’25 and over a billion in GGY alone for July to September last year. Of that billion, over £200 million was for society lotteries like the ones you run. And for participation, we see that 17 per cent of the adult population were playing a society lottery between July and October – which we estimate to be around 9 million people. Both those figures show growth over the last year too. Playing a society lottery is the second most popular form of gambling in Great Britain, following the National Lottery on 32 per cent of the adult population and ahead of betting, which 10 per cent of the adult population will participate in.
Interestingly the society lotteries sector, like many other areas of gambling and the wider economy, sees remote sales being dominant. With remote – so that’s phone as well as online - seeing £793.3 million in GGY versus £314.9 million for non-remote between April ’24 and March ‘25.
This all tells of a society lotteries sector that is raising more money than ever before for good causes up and down the country. For the second year in a row, your sector had GGY of over one billion pounds in 24/25, with a 4.7 per cent increase on the year before. And this meant £484.6 million was raised for good causes – up 4.8 per cent on the year before.
This is good news for the good causes you raise funds for in your communities and in society. But as with any gambling product, there comes risk. Both for the consumer and for you and your organisations. For the people playing your lotteries, this can mean gambling harms. Here too, we have data from the GSGB. Last October’s annual report stated 2.7 per cent of the whole adult population had scored 8+ on the Problem Gambling Severity Index, which means those who may be gambling with negative consequences and a possible lack of control. Whilst this figure – which again is the whole adult population, not just lottery players - is statistically stable with the year before and society lotteries on their own are regularly found to be lower risk gambling products that doesn’t mean you can take your responsibilities to the people playing your lotteries any less seriously. This is especially true as our data shows that those at highest risk of harm are more likely to be playing a mix of gambling products.
But there is also a risk to the reputation of the charities and good causes you are working hard to support. Whether that be from gambling harms or other potential failings, we know you understand that making sure you are compliant with the rules set by the Gambling Commission will protect your players and the good cause you are raising vital funds for. And that of course is where I, my colleagues who have been with you this week and the wider Commission come in.
At the Gambling Commission we want to support you in staying compliant and raising funds for the causes in your communities you help and for the players who win prizes from you – prizes to the sum of over £316 million in 2024/25.
We know that society benefits greatly from your efforts, funding projects and critical work in the third sector and across society that wouldn’t or couldn’t be funded through other means. Your work matters and that’s why it’s so important that you get it right.
Attending events like this year’s Lotteries Council Annual Conference help you with that and I think shows your commitment too. Hopefully over the course of the Conference, you have been able to attend one of the great workshops that Joanne and Claire have been leading. They gave updates on our rules, an explainer on where to find lots of information on how to develop your AML risk assessments as well as information about what information your signposting to sources of support your marketing must detail.
The two of them make a great team and are still here today so, if you have questions or any worries about your obligations under your Gambling Commission licence, please do seek them out before you head home.
Through the team, through sessions like this one and through working with the Lotteries Council and similar bodies, we want to make sure we have a strong, collaborative relationship with the society lotteries sector. One that is based on compliance at the earliest opportunity but one that also gives you the assurance and confidence that you are carrying out your work in a way that is safe and able to keep on raising those vital sums for the good causes you are supporting.
And that’s important. The last few years have been ones of change in gambling, and as last November’s budget showed, change continues. So being able to work closely with you will help us both navigate next steps with confidence, for the benefit of your players and good causes alike. So, what has the year ahead got in store for us?
Well, the Gambling Commission published its business plan for 2026/27 just over a month ago. We’re now entering the final year of our current Corporate Strategy and so, as you would expect, this year’s business plan lays out what we aim to deliver against the strategic focuses detailed in our Corporate Strategy. Those include:
using data and analytics to make gambling regulation more effective,
enhancing our core operational functions,
setting clear evidence-based requirements for licensees,
being proactive and addressing issues at the earliest opportunity.
These, alongside regulating the National Lottery have again this year, run through our business plan commitments. So it means we are looking to further improve our data maturity and evidence base and continuing to both take decisive action and as we’ve just talked about, proactively engage with operators to ensure compliance with our rules. We will be looking to close out the final implementation of the gambling act review commitments that the Commission was responsible for – nothing for society lotteries this year – and continuing the work to evaluate the changes we have already made. It also covers the further work we want to carry out on illegal gambling.
And illegal gambling is of course a big threat for the society lotteries sector and one we know you take seriously. Well, so do we and I want to thank those of you who have, over the last year, reported illegal lotteries to us. This is an important part of our work to frustrate the illegal market and like with other areas, one where we look to take action as ‘upstream’ as possible. So whilst dozens of illegal lotteries are escalated to our Enforcement team each year, our upstream disruptions go further. In 2025 alone we got 356 illegal lotteries taken down by social media companies. That was almost double 2024, where we got 190 taken down. This year another 79 have been taken down already as well. And this activity forms part of our wider, world-leading approach to tackle all forms of illegal gambling in Great Britain. Last financial year that saw:
741 Cease and Desists issued to advertisers and operators
397,527 URLs reported to various search engines and seen 266,667 URLs removed as a result so far
1068 websites referred to the search engines for delisting
1134 websites disrupted so that they have either been taken down or geo-blocked.
And this was all before the new funding from Treasury - £26 million over three years – started coming in. We welcome this new funding from Government and it will allow us to do a great deal more in tackling illegal gambling. And our business plan starts to detail the shape of what we will be doing. It sets out at a high level our intention to scale up, automate where appropriate, and develop our wider strategy to tackle illegal markets activity.
We will consider the drivers of consumer demand to the illegal market and how regulation can support innovation, aligned to the licensing objectives, that maintains the appeal of the licensed market.
We will publish data and metrics to demonstrate impact and to provide insight into the dynamics of the illegal market. We will also, through our work on the Government’s Illegal Gambling Taskforce work with partners to create the first ever national risk assessment for the illegal market in Britain. All this whilst continuing to increase the scale and impact of our enforcement and disruption activities building on our existing partnership working with government, law enforcement and other stakeholders.
But as I and others from the Commission have said, there is only so much we can do alone. We need and want to continue to work with others who have a role to play in keeping illegal gambling as small a part of the market as possible and that includes lotteries. So please do keep on sending in any intelligence you find or receive. It really does make a difference.
Prize competitions and free draws of course are a topic I know many of you are interested in. And of course the Government’s new voluntary code for prize draws came into force yesterday [20 May] for those organisations signed up to it. Now, as many of you will have heard before, free draws and prize competitions are not regulated by the Commission. But connected to our work on illegal gambling, we do police the boundary between these products and illegal lotteries very closely. So again, where you have evidence of wrongdoing or questions about what constitutes the boundary between regulated lotteries and free draws or prize competitions, do have a look at the information on our website or reach out to us and we would be happy to help.
Our business plan is also quite open about how we are aiming to expand on some of the more high-level content once the consultation that Government ran on our fees reports back. DCMS ran the consultation earlier this year and we are grateful to every operator and licensee who responded, including those of you here today.
Other changes at the Commission that you should be aware of and that we think will be of use to you is the roll out of our new Licence Support service earlier this year, that went live following a successful pilot in 2024. We have heard from all sorts of operators in the past that you wanted a single point of contact into the Commission for operational queries and questions and this is exactly what Licence Support looks to do. Benefits for operators include:
a simple route to access guidance, knowledge and information
faster turnaround of queries
improved communication and service experience.
Overall, the aim of the service is to improve the quality and compliance of licence applications, and to support the strategic goal of compliance at the earliest opportunity through proactive communication and access to technical expertise. If you hadn’t heard about it already or would like the contact details do get in touch.
There is as always, plenty for us all to do over the next 12 months. Society lotteries do such amazing work in raising so much money for charities and communities up and down the country. For the sake of the good causes you support and the communities who trust in you, it is absolutely vital that society lotteries keep on doing that good work, in full compliance with our rules. And we want to help you to do just that. Thank you for listening to me today, and I look forward to answering your questions.
Thank you.
Last updated: 21 May 2026
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