Andrew Rhodes updated sector stakeholders on upcoming regulatory policy during the 2024 instalment of the CEO Briefing, with the Gambling Commission’s chief executive urging greater collaboration to achieve “better compliance, better communication and better transparency.”

The Gambling Commission hosted its third annual CEO Briefing in London on 14 November,with industry attendees updated on regulatory progress since 2023, and key areas of innovation, collaboration and transparency that will be the focus of the next twelve months. 

Speaking to chief executives and senior figures from the gambling industry, Commission CEO Andrew Rhodes discussed topics such as customer interaction, evidence gaps and priorities, and the success of the Pilot licensee engagement scheme.

“I’d like to take you back to a slide I used the first time we met,”said Rhodes, referencing the inaugural briefing two years ago. “The point I made in 2022 was that I felt we were focussed at that time on removing the extremes from our work – cases nobody wanted to see or justify and which damaged the industry.”

“I said then I thought we would soon see the tops of those spikes reducing and we would enter a much more complicated phase of regulation, where we would instead be dealing with more nuanced and more complicated issues, with less obvious solutions. This is where I think we now are.”

Referencing his speech to the2023 briefing, Rhodes reiterated his concerns that consumers are not having a clear explanation of why they are asked for information or why they had been prevented from gambling or their stakes had been limited.

“My concern is all too often I seethe phrase ‘regulatory requirements’ quoted when it is actually about terms and conditions or operators seeking to protect themselves against potential fraud or abuse of terms.”

“The industry has a right to shield itself from such things, but I was disappointed not to see movement in the last year towards a clearer position for consumers. I obviously understand the issues of tipping off where money laundering or fraud is suspected, but not all cases are about money laundering or fraud.”

Though Rhodes praised operators in coming together to form GamProtect, he highlighted the fact that the Commission will be pushing for greater transparency in the coming months, between regulator and licensee, and between licensee and consumer.

“Transparency is another are awe committed to doing more on in our Corporate Strategy. This really splits into two broad areas -transparency about the industry,compliance and so on and then transparency to consumers about their own position and why things are happening.”

Interestingly, though, this commitment,in practice at least,seems to travel in one direction. Rhodes omitted to raise the transparency commitments of the Commission itself which are currently kept out of sight: no reference to suicides reporting; no news on the Commission’s growth strategy; no reporting on the number of licence applications running over time limits; no data on action taken on illegal machine sales advertised on social media sites; no publishing of minutes of meetings with the lived experience bodies nor the industry forum…and the list could continue. 

Transparency should be a two-way street; there are still some works to be completed on the one side.