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Report

Annual report and accounts 2024 to 2025

The Gambling Commission's 2024 to 2025 annual report and accounts. For the period 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.

Published
15 October 2025

Last updated
15 October 2025 - Changes

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Contents

Strategic Focus 2 - Enhancing our core operational functions

Over the course of this Corporate Strategy period, we are making the necessary investments to deliver best practice licensing, compliance and enforcement approaches. This includes improving our own operational performance, increasing transparency on compliance levels within the industry and stepping up our work to disrupt illegal gambling by ensuring we have the capacity, capability and means to identify and undertake high impact disruption activity.

Establish an approach that better supports industry engagement and communication

Throughout 2024, our licensing team piloted a revised relationship management approach where licensees were supported by a dedicated team via phone and email to resolve queries, ranging from advice on filling out the new regulatory return forms to technical queries relating to the application of requirements. Given the positive response from those licensees who have taken part, we are continuing to enhance this service during 2025, which includes the multi-year implementation of a new case management system aimed at streamlining and optimising process management throughout the lifecycle of a licence: licensing, compliance, enforcement, intelligence, forensics and anti-money laundering.

We have also established an Operator Engagement Forum with the dual aim of assisting industry to remain compliant through sharing knowledge and peer-to-peer best practice, and to build more collaborative relationships between the Gambling Commission and industry. We hosted 2 events during 2024 to 2025 and the second of these had double the number of attendees than the first. Attendees commented on the value of such events and noted the positive shift in relationship between the Commission and industry these signalled: more are planned for the coming year.

Throughout 2024 to 2025, we continued to develop relationships with industry trade bodies, attending and presenting at compliance and safer gambling forums at the Betting and Gaming Council, British Amusement Catering Trade Association, Bingo Association and the Lotteries Council’s annual conference. Our lotteries team also delivered workshops at this conference which were well attended.

To reach as many stakeholders as possible, we have continued to publish blogs on important topics, including issues consumers face in withdrawing funds from their accounts and a progress update on the financial risk assessments pilot. Through our new podcast, ‘Inside the Commission’ (opens in new tab), we aim to provide listeners with a deeper understanding of the work we do.

Enhance our core operational capabilities

The changes we are making to our operational delivery model have already impacted positively on our performance. Our 2024 to 2025 licensing data reflects the positive movement in relation to the work we are doing to ensure licensees understand the requirements of the application process and to raise potential areas of concern with them. This enables licensees to make informed decisions and provide the right information at an early stage. Annex A details the performance of our operational teams against our published service level agreements.

In addition to the changes we are making to our core operational model, this year we also took steps to increase our efforts in tackling and disrupting illegal gambling activity. We issued 516 cease and desist requests to illegal operators (an increase from 384 during 2023 to 2024), and a further 352 to advertisers and/or affiliates of unlicensed operators. Additionally, our engagement and close collaboration with search engines and third-party technology companies has been crucial for our disruption efforts; 95,705 illegal gambling URLs were removed following our referral to search engines

It was also a busy year for our Sports Betting Integrity Unit (SBIU), with a plethora of high-profile cases involving the Commission. The General Election betting offences investigation drew national headlines and significant public interest leading to 15 people being charged with cheating offences under the Gambling Act 2005. We also had a role to play in a multitude of investigations across the sporting world, as well as ‘behind the scenes’ integrity support that we provided to several major sporting events in 2024 to 2025. Through our work with sporting and commercial betting integrity partners, we provided support to events within Great Britain, for example, Wimbledon 2024, as well as international events held overseas, including UEFA Euro 2024 and the Paris Olympics.

Respond to the consultation1 on financial penalties

In December 2023, we consulted on proposals to make changes to the criteria for imposing a financial penalty and the methodology for determining the amount of a penalty. These proposals aim to make the Commission’s approach to financial penalties more transparent, addressing stakeholder concerns around the transparency and consistency of outcomes. The changes are intended to make the decision-making processes clearer and enable a reduction in the time and resources involved in determining financial penalties.

We have taken time to appropriately consider the consultation responses, and the evidence and perspectives presented in the responses we received. Our response to the consultation is expected to be published early in the 2025 to 2026 financial year and will include details of the implementation timing of any agreed proposals.

Improve the transparency of industry compliance

During 2024 to 2025, we began reporting on the findings of our compliance work within our suite of impact metrics, a set of headline figures intended to help demonstrate the impact of our work. The data represents a ‘snapshot’ of licensee compliance with our regulations according to our most recent licensee assessments. This data is drawn from full initial assessments. Follow up assessments prompted by improvement notices, special measure processes or casework have been excluded. These currently show how many initial assessments of licensed operators have met our requirements and are intended as a first step in being more transparent about this area of our work. They will provide a baseline for our tracking of trends going forward.

We continue to work on improving the compliance snapshots we produce and intend to add additional information on the outcomes of action we have taken over the next year. Annex A of this report shows the figures for 2024 to 2025. We publish our impact metrics quarterly on our website.

References

1 New consultations on financial penalties and ownership reporting

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