Affordability checks were one of the most controversial and hotly debated measures during the UK's gambling act review in 2022 and 2023, seen by some as a simple tool to assess financial risks to a player and by others as a tyrannical invasion of privacy and personal data. Nevertheless, affordability checks were included as part of the white paper as suggested by the Social Market Foundation in a series of reports and
recommendations. But now a senior fellow of the SMF has rolled back on his recommendation, asking the government to pause the implementation of affordability checks over concerns they are not frictionless. So why is there a change of approach and what does this tell us about the debate over gambling reform? Welcome back to iGaming Daily supported by OptiMove, the creator of positionless marketing and the number one player engagement solution for sports
betting and iGaming operators. I'm Charlie Horner and today I'm joined by SBC Media's editor-at-large Ted Mamure and SBC news editor Ted Orm Clay. Ted M, how's things? Very well Charlie, glad to be back on our podline. Very good, no it's good to have you back and talking of good to have you back Ted Oc, welcome back to
the show, how's things? Yeah pretty good, thank you Charlie, good to be back in the studio again feeling refreshed after a couple of days of annual leave and yeah it's always good to come back to a big news story to get stuck into. Yeah a big news story it is as well and I thought we'd left affordability checks behind us a good couple of years ago Ted, but it's back on the news agenda.
Let's have another history lesson Ted because we all know that you're a history professor here at iGaming Daily, how did the idea of affordability checks come about in the UK and what has the industry reaction been like over the last few years? Okay I'm going to try and summarize affordability checks or kind of the journey of affordability checks as best as possible.
So the idea was seeded from the first set of technical concentrations of the Gaming Act Review back in 2022 and in that kind of initial consultation phase DCMS asked stakeholders for feedback on protection layers needed to improve intervention and to minimize the risks of general consumers and gambling harms.
So on a technical level what the UK Gambling Commission put forward was its case to go forth with affordability checks right and this was viewed as a measure that it had already begun to revise under its wider and kind of long-term policy of creating a single view of gambling, prevalence and activities that's been kind of its long-term mandate or its long-term strategy during the 2020s.
Initially and straight from the off the kind of technical mandate of affordability checks was opposed by numerous stakeholders that we're going to get to, but DCMS backed the idea as a much-needed measure to modernize gambling protections in the smartphone era and gave the Commission regulatory clearance to
proceed in 2023. So once they kind of published its blueprints there was kind of much lots of concerns on the design and the implementation but come August 2024 the UKGC launched its initial pilot program which began on checking customers on the threshold of 500 pounds in that deposit, that was phase one. Six months later in February 2025 it began phase two in which it would really put its kind of system in place of light checks at an affordability level
of 150 pounds. Yet since then feedback has been limited on the measure and how the pilot has progressed. Come to it in kind of 2026 and where we stand now there are many points of concerns on the technical application with pushback focused on privacy, false positives and actually the overall practicality and there's a fear now that we're leading the consumers to share kind of unwilling to share their data who might kind of migrate towards the unlicensed market.
And from the developments this week that resistance appears to have been hard as the UKGC is told to put a pause on the affordability checks experiments. Yeah and we knew that this would have a lot of detractors as I said at the top of the show it's quite a controversial measure. You can see why certain stakeholders within the industry and from consumer groups might uphold was
affordability checks but it said OC. It was quite surprising that this week the issue of affordability checks came back into the news this week, particularly because of who it was who was now voiced their opposition to the measures. Could you give a bit of background as to the latest update and why essentially we're talking about this today? Right so as you as you instead have just discussed Charlie the topic of affordability
is quite a historic one in the UK. I mean if anything it predates the whole topic of affordability checks you know when we had the conversations about banning credit card transactions for gambling in the UK a number of years ago. Obviously it was a huge talking point throughout the gambling ad review between
2020 and 2023. The reason it's come back in the news this week and as you mentioned why it's quite interesting you know that it has done the circumstances around it is that the person whose statement has re-raised it is is James Noyes who is from the Social Market Foundation the SMF. The SMF is a think tank which has been a very big proponent of gambling law reform, of regulatory reform in the UK over a number of years.
As Ted mentioned it was a very active voice during the gambling ad review, a big proponent of affordability checks which materializes in the review is finance risk checks, the government kind of did a bit of a rebranding there. They wanted to put it across as something that would be very frictionless and light touch. I believe that the commission estimates only about 0.1% of UK betters will ever come up against these financial
risk checks. James Noyes has now called for a pause of them and a review as to how they're working, the suitability of them. It's you know given that the SMF is a big proponent of these and last year was a big proponent of increasing UK gambling tax they wanted to see the highest threshold out of all the proposed thresholds last year.
Given this this organisation's prominence in these debates it's quite interesting that he has joined the various voices calling for a review of them and a potential pause of them. This includes the likes of the British Horse Racing Authority which penned an open letter to DCMS earlier this month co-signed by a number of other stakeholders. Horse racing was also one of the big opponents of affordability checks during
the gambling ad review. I think they were estimating losses of something like 60 million a year is what comes to mind from affordability checks. That was a figure that was often chucked around around 2021-2022. So yeah that's the reason it's really interesting that it's come back to the news this week as you mentioned Charlie it's because of
who it is who has raised them. Although we should also add that as James Noyes pointed out in his letter to the government this was his own opinion not that of the Social Market Foundation. He did emphasise that in the letter. Yeah Ted M I'll just throw it back over to you now because that is a significant voice to be vocalising their opposition to affordability checks isn't it?
It is it certainly is and I think here we've got to kind of step back and look at who the Social Market Foundation are and how they brand themselves and this is a cross-party think tank and in its mandate it looks through UK policies in which it feels that it can have an unbiased impact and it can get kind of cross-party consensus and move forward and that was what it believed on the Gavin review that it should be toughened significantly tightened in the interest
of the public and its protection the protection of consumers. Also that UK Gavin should face a polluter charge and it actually supported Gordon Brown or pitched to Gordon Brown to support the position of 50% tax on gambling. In terms of James Noyes himself I think he's kind of viewed as kind of the intellectual kind of figureheads in the reformist camp of how gambling legislation should be reshaped.
He's not a prohibitionist, he doesn't support a blanket ban on advertising but what he does want is much stricter protections at the consumer level.
He wants to advocate for consumer redress in terms of a gambling ombudsman and not and I think part of the reason why they backed the affordability checks is because it's going to kind of plug in with what the SMF think should be the wider scheme for UK gambling to get data sharing practices or a data shared scheme between the operators and the UKGC as the big technical goal of the review.
And Noyes wrote this, he aired his opinion in an open letter to Lisa Nandy who is the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport which has oversight of gambling in the UK. What's the government stance on this? Have we heard anything from DCMS or the Gambling Commission in response to Noyes' communications? Ted O'See have you heard anything? Not yet, no I don't think anything has come out. I think we can probably expect the government to continue toeing the line that it has done
for a while. They wanted to see the recommendations of the Gambling Act review seen out. Obviously that review was a really lengthy process as we mentioned earlier. It started in December 2020, ended with the publication of the white paper in April 2023 and the recommendations are still being adopted. I don't really think the government has much of an appetite, especially with loads of other considerations and priorities right now, to really get stuck back into things like
that. The Gambling Commission has reiterated a lot over the past year or so that these financial risk checks shouldn't be considered affordability checks in the same sense. They're meant to be very light touch. I think it's quite confident
that they are frictionless. However, it did issue a statement sometime last year, in September last year, where this was part of a wider assessment it was doing of looking at what regulatory practices and what operator practices might be causing the most customer grievances.
And one of the things they did mention in there was that financial vulnerability checks could be a regulatory practice that could drive customers to unregulated platforms perhaps, which was something obviously the industry has been arguing for some time. I think the commission has kind of recognized in the past the potential drawbacks of this measure, but overall is quite confident in what they're doing with it as one of the flagship measures of the
Gambling Act review. I think you're going to look at DCMS's treatment and oversight of the Gambling review and anytime it's asked a direct question, especially in affordability checks, it just reverts back to its script of we believe that the check should be proportionate and frictionless. And I think we're given any cap. We could be getting to an end of year where we were told 2026 was the year of application and implementation. And we've now reviewed the levy
and affordability checks. I don't think this department's filling its mandate. Yeah, we don't want to open up old wounds of the white paper or the Gambling Act review, because I think I can speak for all of us in the entire industry when I say we spent a little bit too long reporting on that storyline. But Ted, Ted, let's go to a quick break and then we'll analyze what this means and what we can glean about the future. So join us after the break.
Welcome back to iGaming Daily. Now, you know I like to sort of exaggerate a little bit when I write the scripts for these things. So I like to take two polar opposites and then invite my esteemed colleagues to add a little bit of nuance. So I guess to kick us off for this debate, Ted M, what can we read into this situation? Does this sort of damage the credibility of those reformists who wanted to implement these affordability checks only for them to roll
back on their ideas a few years later? Or on the other hand, does it show that they're sort of empirical and data-led and follow the evidence? No, I agree with you. I think there is a bit of damage there. And I think if you look at the the SMF and the way that they kind of pigeonholed gambling and what they wanted and kind of did lobby out the very senior figures in parliament
to support their mandates. Now to have that kind of, you know, to go back and then we're now at the kind of the technical phase of the implementation of the key measures of the gambling review. And those of them seem to be progressing and I don't necessarily think that this is just the fault of the UKGC. The pilot is there to, you know, draft out or to highlight the practicality
of putting this system in place. I think part of the problem is that affordability checks sounded great on paper and we're now finding out that the practicality is much harder. And also that if you we go back to consultation is that I think that affordability checks what kind of view there's this kind of panacea to every issue on the protection of the
general consumer. The focus here should have been in a much bigger kind of big data play, data sharing, or just saying, look, who do we think are the vulnerable players? What are their triggers? What are kind of like the trends that we can see in play and improve kind of oversight there? I don't think that the SMF presented kind of any alternatives other than it's affordability checks or the the gamma review is trashed. Ted or C, come jump in here
if you want. Yeah, I think it's hard to disagree with Ted's point there, given the affordability checks or financial risk checks as they became in the white paper were really the main thing that the SMF was calling for all those years. Again, I guess it is important to reiterate that James Noyes has stated this is his opinion and not that of SMF. Although, I mean, to a lot of people it will be hard to separate the two, given his role in the think tank over the past few years as well.
Yeah, it is a bit damaging to their arguments. Obviously, it does also come after not that long after the whole debate about taxes last year that I was mentioning earlier in the SMF's role in that. So I think a lot of gambling stakeholders might be rolling their eyes a bit at this. Yeah, absolutely. Here's another point that I guess would have been brought up by many in the industry during the consultation periods and things like that.
This idea that affordability checks would be fantastic if they were non-intrusive, was that always a little bit fanciful? By the nature of these checks, there has to be some friction, right? Can they always be, or can they ever be truly frictionless? How can they not be intrusive, Ted or C?
Okay. So in the white paper, the main thing that the Gambling Commission was banking on, no pun intended, apologies, was open banking and the use of that technology of those practices as a way to seamlessly share data from a customer, their banking provider and the operator without the need for customers to then be directly handing over pay slips and bank statements and proof of income and things like that, which a lot of personal information that people wouldn't be
happy sharing with an operator or any other third party really. I think they really need to prove that that can work properly to prove that these are non-intrusive. But again, to many people, a bit like what you've just mentioned, Charlie, to a lot of people, the notion of sharing something via open banking is still going to come across as intrusive.
People are understandably very protective and very cagey about sharing financial information, personal information, those sort of details with anyone, whether it's a major operator or not. It's a very hard thing to prove, I think, that they are going to be non-intrusive. I guess the figure though that the UK Gambling Commission will hinge on quite a lot is the fact that it only applies to a very, very small fraction of people
who meet these thresholds. The battle then is just this minority of people whose thresholds, who do meet the thresholds, how can you prove to them that it's going to be non-intrusive? That's the big question here and it's a really, really difficult one. There's always been so many liabilities on that transparency of who are that, kind of 0.05% of people that are going to be chased. The Commission even with the pilot
program is yet to answer that. So we haven't even seen it transferred to a live environment. Again, going back to that mistake where I think what the Commission fundamentally got wrong was that it put all its basket, put a significant amount of eggs in the basket of affordability shakes. That was a measure that was transferred from its view that it wanted this mandate to create a single view of the player in
this decade. I think how it just stepped up to that program and said the affordability checks are part of that remit, not of
the Gambling Review. I think that there would have been better grounds to test the long-term viability of affordability checks and how can you roll it out, how it's going to be implemented over not necessarily a period of six months, but over a period of however long it needed, two years, three years, how to get it in by the end of the decade and how to actually work with UK finance on applying the
best checks. I think what we're learning here and particularly over the conversations that we've had over the last week or so, Ted, is that organisations just need to talk to each other more. But it seems like a very difficult task bringing people into a consensus. One outcome of this that I have thought about is, is this a big win for the industry and in particular the BGC, the Better New Gaming Council?
Because over the last six months on the show, we've maybe taken a little bit of a not critical view of some of the BGC's actions, but we've questioned their approach sometimes. But do you think this is a win for the industry and those who have long argued that stringent measures would ultimately send players to the black market? Ted M, you're looking a little bit curious on this one. Do you want to take this
one first? Well, I mean, you could say it's nice to say I told you so, but it doesn't feel like a win. And again, we're doing about the BGC and that's another organisation that's going through a transition phase at the moment, post gambling review, and that it's kind of looking at the next era of UK online gambling
and what part it plays in there. And I think it's where political sensitivities like, yes, look, affordability checks might not work out, but I think that the BGC has to kind of live in these political circles and isn't going to rock the boat. I don't think there'll be kind of any cheers from their side. Ted or C, do you think that this whole story really is a case of be careful what you wish for on the side of the reformist side of the debate?
Perhaps, yeah. I mean, kind of relating it to the question you just asked that Ted has mentioned, sorry, I'd imagine a few people in the industry are feeling vindicated, even though they won't be very happy to be vindicated about something like this as Ted alluded to. There's always, the industry makes this argument a lot and people often talk down of it. And we have said on the podcast before that we think sometimes the industry relies too heavily on the black market argument against over
regulation, over taxation and stuff. But yeah, there is always that to consider the idea that if something has brought in the customers' reality badly too, they will look elsewhere to find the products that they want, find the betting markets that they want and so on. And those might be provided by someone that is unlicensed, isn't paying taxes, isn't subject to the same player protection standards and things like that. And ultimately that is more detriment of the customer
and the market. That argument does have some merits to it. And yeah, I think some people will probably be feeling vindicated by this. But ultimately, this is just a statement from James Noyes, just this is one individual, this isn't the the Gamba reform lobby at large. There'll be a lot of people who still have arguments
in favor of these checks. This and coupled with some of the feedback we've heard about the new research education and treatment levy and some of the difficult transitions that have come about through that. Yeah, there's probably a few people who like Ted said, will be thinking, we told you so. I think it just really reflects the complexities of some of these things and some of the drastic changes that we're seeing in the industry throughout
this decade. I'm just wary that we're running out of time, but Ted M, I'll give the final word to you. How do you think this whole debate, because it is a debate and as Ted also says, it's just the voice of one person involved in this debate, but it is something that's rumbled on for a while.
How does this reflect on the governments and multiple governments gambling regulation strategy, because this is an amalgamation of stories that we've been talking about over the period of, I mean, you could say six months, you could say five years. It's a hard question to close today's podcast on. I can only reflect on, and I'll put this back to Ted OC here. You can only reflect on what
you see. And again, this is going back to how does DCMS reply anytime it gets asked the question about UK gambling regulations, it just points back to the gambling review and says that they're waiting for the measures to be implemented. And then they can just point the UK, GC and say, Hey guys, it's on you. And we're only implementing the measures that they wanted. It's reflective of other
markets. And I was actually thinking about this today, and following the levy, following the tax fees that I think UK gambling is on the platform and it's waiting for a very, very slow train. And all the poor times are saying everything's delayed. Not only delayed, but destination unknown. You said it. Yeah, I think that's a great place to leave it. So thanks a lot, Ted and Ted here in the studio for joining me on this one today. And thank you to OptiMove, our sponsor for supporting the show.
And thank you to our audience for tuning into today's episode of iGaming Daily. And join us again tomorrow to keep up to date with all the latest global gambling news.