WALL OF SHAME The UK’s New Gambling Minister Before anyone accuses us of prejudging her, let’s look at the résumé. In a statement on her own website in November 2018, Foxcroft called for a ban on credit card betting, backed a ban on gambling ads in live sport, and asked for a compulsory 1% levy on operators. In October 2025 she signed Dawn Butler’s early day motion calling for the removal of “aim to permit,” the rule that stopped councils simply refusing betting shop applications. And she has called problem gambling a “hidden epidemic,” in a country where the overwhelming majority of players never have a problem. She also inherits the chair of the Illegal Gambling Taskforce, which was established to tackle illegal payments, advertising and cross-agency enforcement. So who loses here? Affiliates with U.K. traffic, watching their market shrink brand by brand while a minister treats the one channel that actually steers players toward licensed operators as part of the problem. WARC forecasts unlicensed operators will raise their advertising spend by 32% this year while licensed operators cut theirs by 9.2%. Affiliate program managers lose too. Costs up, player values down, and a growing suspicion that the U.K. isn’t worth the paperwork anymore. And let’s not forget the players! They keep playing. Just somewhere with no self-exclusion, no age checks, and nobody to call when the withdrawal never arrives. Nine ministers since the Gambling Act review began in 2020, and a black market whose share of online betting revenue rose from around 2% in 2022 to 9% in the first half of 2025. You will fit right in, Ms. Foxcroft. Welcome to the club! Good news out of the U.K., folks. After a year that gutted the retail betting sector and handed a growing share of the market to unlicensed offshore operators, the government has finally acted. It appointed a new gambling minister. Wait until you see who. First, here’s the story. Over the past 12 months, Flutter shut 57 Paddy Power shops across Britain and Ireland. Entain cut around 500 jobs, about 2% of its workforce. Evoke, which owns William Hill and 888, closed shops and slashed costs. And on 31 July, Betfred announced 132 closures and more than 600 job losses, taking it down to around 1,100 shops from more than 1,600 in 2017. Remote gaming duty jumped from 21% to 40% in April. A 25% duty on online sports betting lands in April 2027, with racing excluded from the increase. Meanwhile, the black market, the thing all this regulation was supposedly built to prevent, now accounts for roughly 9% of the U.K. online market, according to Yield Sec. Frontier Economics puts 1.5 million British players staking as much as £4.3 billion a year with operators who operate outside Britain’s licensing and consumer-protection framework. Enter Vicky Foxcroft. GPWAtimes.org 68
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