Walk into some high-street “bingo” venues, and you’ll struggle to find the actual bingo. New figures show slot machines now earn almost twice what bingo itself does across the sector, and one campaigner has called the whole arrangement a Trojan horse. Is that fair, or just the usual finger-wagging?
The news in A NUTSHELL
The numbers: Gaming machines produced £461.7m of gambling yield in licensed bingo premises in the year to March 2026, against £242.1m from bingo itself.
The charge: A gambling harm campaigner has described bingo as a Trojan horse for machine operations.
The fix on the table: A government consultation proposing a dedicated bingo area in every licensed venue plus a minimum number of bingo seats. It closed in January, and the sector’s still waiting for an answer.
of bingo-sector yield now comes from slot machines
bingo’s share of yield at high-street bingo operators
of Merkur Slots’ 340 venues licensed as bingo
traditional bingo clubs left, down from 335 in 2018
The latest Gambling Commission statistics have handed bingo’s critics their most potent weapon yet. In the year to March 2026, gambling machines in licensed bingo premises generated £461.7 million in gross gambling yield, while the game those premises are licensed for brought in £242.1 million. Machines now account for almost two-thirds of the sector’s takings, and the trend runs in only one direction: their share was 44% in 2014, 63% a decade later, and 65.6% now. Revenue from the higher-stake Category B machines has nearly doubled since 2019-20, to around £361 million.
Those figures prompted one gambling harm campaigner to call bingo a Trojan horse for machine operations, and the phrase has stuck. As charges go, it’s a serious one. It implies the bingo licence has become a costume worn by arcades, and that the dabber-and-caller image of a Saturday afternoon at the club is cover for something else entirely.
Two businesses, one licence
The averages actually hide the real story, which is that “bingo premises” now describes two completely different trades. For operators focused on traditional clubs, bingo still generates around 51% of gambling yield, and in holiday parks it’s 55%. For operators running mainly high-street bingo premises, bingo produces less than 1%. Machines make the other 99%.
The estate has shifted to match. Traditional clubs registered with the Bingo Association fell from 335 to 248 between 2018 and 2024, while high-street bingo premises nearly doubled from 119 to 218. Total bingo premises actually grew this year, to 714, but that growth came almost entirely from the small-format end. And the licence register tells the rest: of Merkur Slots’ 340 venues, 227 hold bingo licences, and 106 are licensed as adult gaming centres, though from the street they look like the same business, with a “bingo played here” sticker doing a lot of heavy lifting on the shop window.
The word doing all the work
None of this is illegal, and that’s the crux. The Commission’s social responsibility code only lets bingo premises offer machines where “substantive” facilities for bingo are also available, and the venue must be recognisable as a bingo hall. Nobody has ever defined “substantive.” There’s no minimum floor space, no minimum number of seats, no revenue test. The Commission resisted imposing a hard number deliberately to avoid a one-size-fits-all rule, and that flexibility protected everything from holiday park sessions to electronic bingo. It also left a gap wide enough to park an arcade in, especially when a single electronic tablet can offer bingo one minute and slots content the next.
Why wear the bingo badge at all?
Interestingly, the answer isn’t a bigger stash of high-stakes machines, because the machine allowances for bingo premises and AGCs are broadly similar. The advantages are subtler. A bingo licence permits forms of bingo an arcade can’t offer, and bingo premises can seek an alcohol licence, whereas AGC customers can’t drink while they gamble. The licence type also shapes how local authorities assess a venue’s risk, and which land-based self-exclusion scheme covers it.
One more incentive may be arriving. The Prime Minister’s high-street crackdown includes a planning permission requirement for new adult gaming centres. If that passes as announced and bingo premises aren’t caught by it, the bingo badge becomes worth more, not less, overnight. That’s my analysis rather than anyone’s confirmed plan, but you don’t need to be a cynic to see the arbitrage.
Trojan horse, or puritans whining?
If directed squarely at the high street situation, the Trojan horse charge isn’t moralising – it’s arithmetic. A venue that takes 99p in every pound from machines and a penny from bingo is an arcade in every sense that matters to a player, and the government itself conceded as much in its own consultation, acknowledging a growing number of bingo-licensed premises that are hard to tell apart from AGCs. When the regulator’s figures and the government’s own paperwork agree with the campaigners, “puritans” probably isn’t a fair rebuttal.
Where the charge overreaches is the Trojan horse image itself, which implies stealth and scheming. What’s actually happened is far less underhanded: operators found an undefined word in the rulebook and built a business model on it, perfectly lawfully, over a decade in which nobody in government bothered to define it. And pointed at the traditional clubs, the charge would be unfair. A club running scheduled games for hundreds of regulars, taking about half its revenue from bingo and relying on machines to pay the heating bill, is exactly what the licence was designed for, and a real social institution in plenty of towns. Revenue share alone can’t settle the question either, because a handful of machines will always out-earn hundreds of bingo seats. If the campaigners’ language drags those clubs into the same dock as the sticker-on-the-window arcades, that’s when it tips into finger-wagging.
Would hall-specific rules make trading harder?
The consultation’s proposals are straightforward: every bingo venue would need a continuous bingo area covering 30%, 40% or 50% of the premises, with no cabinet machines inside it, plus a minimum of 30 or 40 distinct bingo positions. Operators who’d rather stay machine-led could convert to an AGC licence instead, giving up most forms of bingo and probably their drinks licence, and paying for the privilege.
My view is that the fix should combine both tests at the low end of the ranges: a recognisable bingo area and a meaningful number of playable seats, pitched small enough that honest formats survive. The timing matters too. These venues also face the threatened doubling of Machine Games Duty, which would hit legitimate clubs hardest of all given how much of their income machines supply. A government that wants a living bingo sector rather than a tidy licence register should be careful not to stack three problems on the same doorstep in one autumn.
Campaigners say bingo is a Trojan horse, and for a slice of the high street they’re simply right, even if “loophole” would be the more accurate word than anything out of Homer. The sensible fix isn’t to punish bingo; it’s to make the label mean something again, so a player walking through a door marked bingo finds a game of bingo, and a player walking into an arcade knows exactly which rules and protections apply. The clubs have nothing to fear from that. The venues with a sticker on the window and 99% of their takings in the machines might, but then they’ve been playing a different game all along anyway.