UK Gamblers Strongly Against More Affordability Checks

The immediate news we’re reporting on here is a new YouGov poll, commissioned by the Betting and Gaming Council and reported by iGaming Business, which says nearly two-thirds of bettors would refuse to provide personal financial documents if required in order to continue betting. That finding isn’t remotely hard to believe. I’d be more surprised if gamblers welcomed the idea. The average punter doesn’t hear “enhanced customer protection” and picture a neat, proportionate safety net. They picture a nosy operator asking for payslips after a decent Saturday on the football. That suspicion is real, and frankly, the industry has earned some of it over the years by making routine compliance feel clumsy, inconsistent and faintly accusatory.

Still, I think this story needs cleaning up a bit before people start treating it as proof that the public has decisively rejected every form of financial oversight in gambling. The first problem is the phrase “affordability checks” itself. It’s become a catch-all label for almost anything involving customer spending, credit data, affordability, vulnerability or source-of-funds scrutiny. The Gambling Commission has actually gone out of its way to say that financial risk assessments are not simply another name for affordability checks, and that it’s not proposing a live, blanket, documentary regime under that label. That doesn’t mean punters are wrong to worry. It does mean the debate is often sloppier than it should be.

At the lower end, light-touch financial vulnerability checks are already in place. They apply where net deposits exceed £150 over a rolling 30-day period, and the Commission says they’re based on publicly available data, not on rummaging through your bank statements, not on your postcode, and not on your job title. They also don’t affect your credit score. At the higher end, the more controversial bit is the pilot for frictionless financial risk assessments, aimed at high-spending remote accounts. Again, the official line is that this isn’t being rolled out in a live environment yet. It’s being tested to see whether it can be targeted, data-driven and mostly invisible to customers.

In the background of all this, the industry’s poll is really telling us something quite specific. It tells us gamblers strongly dislike the idea of handing over documents. Fair enough. So do I. But that isn’t exactly the same thing as saying they oppose every version of data-led checks on high-risk spending. In fact, when the Commission published its own research in 2024, after setting out the package in fuller detail, the numbers looked very different. That research found broad support for the overall proposals, with 74% saying they would support the package being implemented and 78% saying it was necessary to protect people from gambling harm. For financial risk assessments specifically, 65% were favourable towards the use of credit reference agency data, provided there was reassurance around credit records and the checks were properly explained.

This is why I’m not especially impressed when either side pretends the evidence is simple. The industry likes to frame the issue as one of state intrusion and black-market drift. Regulators and reformers sometimes talk as if any resistance must come from people who don’t care about harm. Both positions are a bit too simple. The truth is that British gamblers can hold two views at once. They can dislike intrusive checks, and they can also recognise that a system which lets somebody lose eye-watering sums without meaningful intervention has obviously gone wrong.

The Commission’s case for action isn’t built on theory. It’s repeatedly pointed to ugly examples where operators allowed staggering losses despite obvious warning signs, including cases involving customers in deep financial trouble, customers spending out of all proportion to their income, and customers who should never have been left alone that long. If you read those examples and still think absolutely no tighter oversight is justified, I don’t think you’re being serious. There is a real problem to solve here.

Where I think the Commission still has work to do is trust. Gamblers don’t trust operators with sensitive information, and I can see why. Plenty of ordinary customers have had bad experiences with verification, delayed withdrawals, contradictory safer gambling messages, and support agents who talk like they’re copying and pasting from a script. So when the industry says punters feel uneasy, I believe it. The snag is that the same industry often uses that genuine unease to blur together three different things: existing light-touch vulnerability checks, proposed frictionless risk assessments for a small high-spend cohort, and the far more invasive manual document requests that almost every type of gambler opposes. 

That muddle suits campaigners because it turns a technical policy fight into a simple cultural grievance. “They want your bank statements” is a much easier rallying cry than “they’re piloting a credit-reference-agency-based system for a small proportion of high-spending remote accounts and have set an 80% frictionless benchmark”. The problem is that detail matters here. In its stage two pilot update, the Commission said around 97% of assessments in that stage could be completed in a frictionless manner, and estimated that only about 0.1% of active accounts would both require an assessment and be unable to receive one frictionlessly if introduced at the consulted thresholds. That doesn’t prove the model is perfect, but it does seriously weaken the idea that this is obviously heading towards mass document collection for everybody.

Then there’s the racing angle, which is impossible to ignore because it’s driving much of the current noise. More than 400 figures from British racing have backed an open letter calling on Lisa Nandy to pause the measures, and the warning that new measures will drive players to the black market is now being pushed hard. I take that risk seriously. I’ve written before that if regulated sites become too awkward, too preachy or too suspicious, some customers will drift towards offshore brands that don’t care about British rules. But I also think racing and the wider industry sometimes use the black market as a kind of all-purpose veto. It’s a real danger, not a magic phrase that should automatically kill every reform.

My own view is that the public opposition in the new poll is real, but it shouldn’t be read in such simple terms. It’s a loud objection to intrusive, document-heavy friction. It’s not yet a knock-down case against every targeted financial risk check. If the final system is genuinely narrow, genuinely frictionless for almost everyone, and genuinely aimed at the worst-risk accounts, I think the principle is defensible. If it turns into a sprawling paperwork culture where ordinary gamblers feel treated like loan applicants for backing a few horses and playing some roulette, then the backlash will be deserved.

So, in summary, it’s definitely true that UK gamblers are strongly against more affordability checks, at least as they currently imagine them. I don’t blame them. But the real question isn’t whether punters like the idea. Of course they don’t. The real question is whether the final version of the proposed solution can target serious financial risk without turning normal gambling into an endless compliance interview. That is still the test, and neither the industry’s outrage nor the regulator’s confidence has settled it yet.