Comment: racing faces catastrophic £250m hit as Gambling Commission ignores affordability warnings

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We were promised that affordability checks would only be introduced if they were truly frictionless.

Yet despite unwavering opposition from punters, warnings about their impact from British racing and evidence from the gambling industry that they will be anything but frictionless for many, the Gambling Commission's board has decided to press ahead with them.

The impact on racing could be calamitous, should forecasts of a £250 million impact on the sport's finances come to pass.

The government has effectively abdicated responsibility for the policy, trusting the regulator that the checks will not be intrusive and only affect a tiny percentage of accounts.

For some reason both ministers and the commission have decided to ignore the findings from the operators who carried out the trial of what have been termed financial risk assessments by the government and regulator since 2024.

They have cautioned that as many as one in five punters with an annual spend of as little as £200 would be asked to provide financial documents based on their experience of the checks and the inconsistencies in the findings returned by credit reference agencies.

Perhaps the Gambling Commission is right and can be taken at its word that the checks will not impact customers. However, the evidence of the formbook suggests that is not always a wise policy.

• Controversial affordability checks on punters given green light by Gambling Commission despite opposition from racing and bookmakers 

This is of course the Gambling Commission which insisted that it had not already mandated checks despite having stated in its 2020 Compliance and Enforcement Report that "customers wishing to spend more than the national average should be asked to provide information to support a higher affordability trigger such as three months' payslips".

The commission also promised to publish the results of a consultation it carried out on the subject of affordability checks. Yet when it finally did, more than three years after the consultation closed in 2021, all it produced was a summary which dealt with responses in only broad terms. 

It took a freedom of information request for the results to finally appear, results which showed punters' overwhelming opposition to being asked for personal information, but by that point it was too late to influence the last government's 2023 white paper which contained the proposals for affordability checks.

It is hard not to be cynical about the reason for the delay.

Then there is the black market. In 2023 the commission's then chief executive Andrew Rhodes told MPs that the risk posed by the black market was "overstated" and that its size was "very small". Yet in 2025 the government provided the Gambling Commission with £26 million over three years to tackle the issue, so worrying it had become.

So perhaps it is understandable that people should take the commission's promises with more than a pinch of salt.

Meanwhile the uncertainty over the checks will continue. An implementation group will now take over responsibility for the checks' introduction at a point yet to be decided.

There have also been suggestions that the measures could be open to legal challenge.

And British racing must wait to see whether ham-fisted gambling regulations will wipe tens of millions of pounds from its finances.

The numbers behind the news

£250m The cost to racing in lost revenues over five years, as modelled by independent consultants Regulus Partners in 2023
120,000 The number of racing punters who could face affordability checks, as projected by the Betting & Gaming Council
96,000 The number of punters from the figure above expected to refuse to provide financial documents
£13m The estimated annual loss in levy receipts from those 96,000 refusals
66% Survey respondents in 2021 who would be uncomfortable or very uncomfortable with a credit reference agency accessing their personal information

Read these next:

Controversial affordability checks on punters given green light by Gambling Commission despite opposition from racing and bookmakers 

Lack of parliamentary scrutiny of affordability checks 'beggars belief', says BHA 

Decision on affordability checks discussed at Gambling Commission board meeting 

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