Betting expert hits back at 'clearly ludicrous' claim affordability checks can't be assessed until they are implemented

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Professional punter and betting expert Neil Channing has labelled comments from a senior executive at the Gambling Commission that affordability checks can only truly be measured once implemented as “clearly ludicrous”.

Channing was responding to a claim made by Tim Miller, executive director at the Gambling Commission, who said on Tuesday when asked about the affordability checks pilot that “you can't evaluate something until you have implemented it”.

Miller had been asked about the pilot in response to James Noyes, an early advocate for affordability checks, resigning from a key government advisory board saying it “astonishes me” that the controversial scheme could be approved by the Gambling Commission board next week “before any meaningful – and independent – evaluation of this policy can be carried out”.

• Astonishing and unacceptable: key DCMS adviser quits in disgust over plan to roll out affordability checks 

Channing said: “It’s clearly ludicrous to say that you can’t assess something until it’s implemented. I thought that was the point of the trial. How can you have put something in place for the last year if you don’t know if it’ll work?

“I also agree with the point made by James Noyes in that you have to have independent analysis of the trial. The Gambling Commission can’t mark its own homework as it, no doubt, thinks it’s done a great job. At no point have they listened to punters on this.

“I feel that we're being perpetually gaslit. Anyone having a bet knows affordability checks have been happening for years, yet the Gambling Commission still talks about it being like a mythical thing. None of this deters me from thinking they don’t know what it’s like to gamble as what this shows is they must not know.”

Last year the Gambling Commission launched a pilot to determine if affordability checks, or financial risk assessments as they have also been termed, could be undertaken frictionlessly on punters hitting certain spending thresholds using credit reference agencies.

Tim Miller: claimed evaluation of affordability checks could only take place once they were implemented

However, data from the pilot has highlighted different information being returned on the same people, potentially meaning bookmakers would be required to request sensitive financial documents from bettors, such as payslips, to allow them to continue their betting.

Gambling industry expert David Zeffman, of specialist law firm CMS, said: “Evaluation after implementation is obviously crucial, but I still see a place for evaluation prior to full implementation.

“After all, governments have impact assessments on draft legislation and I don’t think something has to be in operation across the whole industry to be able to evaluate it. That was presumably the purpose of the pilot.”

Asked about Miller's comments and the reactions to them, a Gambling Commission spokesperson said: "A pilot was used to test how frictionless the white paper policy could be and give us useful findings on how it could be implemented. We have been rigorously assessing that work in detail throughout the pilot, drawing upon a range of evidence and input from pilot participants and advised by [the National Centre for Social Research].

"The proposed approach has been subject to significant scrutiny already and we have published findings during the process. An evaluation is a distinct tool used to measure whether a regulatory change has delivered the intended outcomes and looks at the way it was implemented and its effect in the real world.”

Read more:

Affordability checks driving a 'massive worldwide money laundering issue', warns leading financial crime expert 

Affordability checks will be evaluated 'in the real world' despite calls for a pause in their implementation 

Astonishing and unacceptable: key DCMS adviser quits in disgust over plan to roll out affordability checks 

Flutter chief executive Peter Jackson calls on Gambling Commission to 'think again' about affordability checks 

New report claims black market gambling has more than tripled to nearly £17 billion since 2019 

How ChatGPT and AI chatbots help punters to bypass affordability checks and bet on the black market 

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