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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.

Strategic Focus 4 - Being proactive and addressing issues at the earliest opportunity 

It is in the interests of all stakeholders that licensees achieve and retain compliance. In our Corporate Strategy, we signalled our intention to focus on more proactive activities and interventions with licensees to support them to meet their legal obligations.

During 2024 to 2025, we focused on the following initiatives:

Develop and embed an Industry Forum

The Industry Forum (IF), made up of people working across gambling in Great Britain, was established to provide industry insight into the Gambling Commission's plans, the quality of our service and the wider environment in which gambling operators work. The IF met for the first time in March 2024 and subsequent meetings have taken place approximately every 6 weeks, mainly at the Commission’s offices in Birmingham. The IF has discussed topics generated from a proactive look ahead of the business plan to identify where its input could be useful, and items put forward by colleagues related to ongoing work.

Engaging with the IF has helped the Commission in several areas, including how we develop and manage consultations, how we communicate with operators of different sizes, our strategic assessment of the fair and open licensing objective, our data innovation work, and our approach to operational delivery and anti-money laundering. We publish the minutes of meetings on our website to provide a public record of topics and discussions that have taken place.

Strategically assess the Fair and Open licensing objective

One of the objectives of the Gambling Act 2005 is to ensure that gambling is conducted in a fair and open way (section 1(b)). During 2024 to 2025, we conducted a comprehensive strategic assessment of this objective, drawing on available evidence from our consumer research programme, data from Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) providers, findings from our compliance work, stakeholder engagement and relevant academic research. This assessment identified a number of areas where focus is needed.

We have given priority to those issues which consumers tell us are of most importance to them. Our focus during 2025 to 2026 will include a package of work on improving transparency for consumers on the reasons for identity checks or account restrictions, particularly where these take place later in the consumer journey, such as on withdrawal. Despite our work with some operators to improve in this area, issues relating to withdrawals continue to be the cause of most of the complaints we receive.

Our key objectives in undertaking this work are to ensure that gambling products and services are fair, consumers can make informed choices because information is clear and easy to understand, and licensees deal with consumer issues fairly and promptly.

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