It was a warmer and fuzzier Andrew Rhodes at this year’s Bacta Convention. And he’s planning for a stronger relationship between the industry and regulator.

The Gambling Commission is in a collaborative mood was the message chief executive Andrew Rhodes delivered to the Bacta Convention this week. “We much prefer a collaborative approach,” he told delegates. “Our relationship with Bacta is excellent in that regard. The more you can do yourselves, the better the whole environment becomes, and the more it allows us to focus elsewhere.”

And the areas the Commission wants to focus on in the coming months are compliance and enforcement, and technical standards – the nitty gritty stuff of regulation.

And for Rhodes there is some work to do in this area, he argued. “Earlier this year we wrote to all adult gaming centre licensees about their self-exclusion obligations. Unfortunately, despite this, we continued to see issues. So at the start of this month, we announced decisive regulatory action: seven AGC operators had their operating licences immediately suspended for failing to participate in the schemes. Most of those licences have now been reinstated after steps were taken, but others remain under investigation, with potential further action to follow.”

With that said and done, the GamCom chief was also quick to praise the industry for its endeavours in progressing innovation to plug the holes in self-exclusion responses. He made particular note of the Commission’s support for Bacta’s Self-Exclusion Exchange event in Leeds which had proved a significant success.

The art of collaboration is certainly the canvas the Commission is brush-stroking, but one assumes it might get a bit tetchy when it comes to technical standards. But that, however, is not a problem for Rhodes and his team. In fact, the collaboration has been hugely beneficial to date.

“As you know, earlier this year we launched our consultation on gaming machine technical standards. I’ve been really pleased with the pre-consultation engagement with the sector, and we received over a thousand consultation responses – far higher than expected. The detail and quality of the submissions have been excellent. That means the work takes longer, but it’s worth it.”

That work is currently leading the Commission towards the conclusion that “there is general support for consolidating the 12 existing technical standards into a single standard, updating them for clarity, and revising the Gaming Machine Testing Strategy.”

In all, the Commission has a hectic schedule coming up, and that will need support from the industry. As Rhodes concluded: “We live in interesting times. Gambling, consumers, taxation – everything is intense right now. I genuinely thought that after the long gestation period of the White Paper, things might calm down – but I was wrong. If anything, things have intensified.

“The Commission will continue to work with stakeholders to be pragmatic, to listen, to be open, and to communicate clearly what our concerns are. That’s the basis on which we’re trying to operate. We think we can make good progress, but there is always more to do.”