The regulator is being forced to dig deep into its pockets in order to defend its selection for the National Lottery licence against claims of bias from former media mogul Richard Desmond. And the legal outlay is eye watering.
The Gambling Commission’s decision to award the National Lottery licence to Allwyn has landed it in litigious hot-water to the tune of millions of pounds, new financial records reveal.
The regulator’s latest accounts show that the operational coƒsts of running the lottery leaped from £14.4m to £28.8m in the year ending March 2025, with almost all of the uptick (£13.4m) due to a splurge on legal fees.
The Commission is in the process of being sued by former Daily Express and Channel 5 owner Richard Desmond, after his 2022 bid for the fourth National Lottery licence lost out to Czech-owned outfit Allwyn.
Desmond maintains that the bidding process lacked transparency and that the regulator mishandled the contending applications in a manner which favoured Allwyn from the outset. The media mogul is seeking a whopping £1.3bn in damages as a result.
Desmond is the owner of both the New Lottery Company and Northern & Shell, the latter of which has operated the National Health Lottery since its launch in 2011.
For its part, the Commission said it selected Allwyn due to the fact that the company had “committed to investment in the National Lottery that is expected to deliver growth and innovation across [its] products and channels,” which would in turn result in “increased contributions to good causes.”
That, in fairness, hasn’t gone exactly to plan with completion slots missed very early in to the new licence, something which the regulator has been publicly scathing about.
And Allwyn’s pledge to increase the National Lottery’s charitable contributions has also proved illusive thus far: the company has maintained that it requires a significant upgrade of its IT systems before it can deliver the goods.
Missed deadlines and tardy charitable contribution growth will have done little to bolster the legal defence of the Commission’s choice of operator. Neither has the regulator’s relationship with Allwyn with the GambCom’s patience on this front seemingly running out: the regulator confirmed this July that it had begun disciplinary enforcement proceedings against Allwyn in an attempt to make it honour its commitments.
The jury, as they say, is still out on the increasingly expensive Desmond versus GamCom case, but when you’ve already started enforcement action against your original choice of operator so early into the agreement, it’s definitely looking like a very poor choice if not the wrong choice?
