The 2005 UK Gambling Bill
by Max Drayman, Winneronline
24 Nov 06
The machinations of U.S. lawmakers over their citizens’ future access to internet gambling facilities have tended to overshadow legislation that has already been passed and is currently being implemented in the United Kingdom. This is unfortunate because the UK Gambling Bill of 2005 is much more progressive than any legislation the Americans have presented and I believe it is likely to have a much greater and long term impact on the internet gambling scene.
What then is the UK Gambling Bill? In laymen’s terms, the Bill does four things:
1) It paves the way for the UK to license, develop and govern casinos.
2) Defines and creates the government bodies that will oversee, advise and regulate gambling in the UK.
3) Defines the fairness requirements of casino games and prohibits under-age players from participating.
4) Expands the government's gambling jurisdiction to include the internet and all modern telecommunications systems.
The Gambling Commission is the primary official government body created by the Gambling Act. The Commission "regulates gambling in the public interest by keeping crime out of gambling, ensuring that gambling is conducted fairly and openly and protecting children and vulnerable people." The Commission is also responsible for advising local and central government on issues related to gambling. Finally, from 2007 it will have responsibility for the regulation of betting and remote gambling.
As you've probably gathered by now, licensing and the administration thereof, is what the Gambling Bill is really all about. The gaming interests in the UK appear to have wanted the government to open the doors to big-dollar casinos, free from the size restrictions that the old (1960s) laws had imposed and from that, the Bill evolved into a restructuring of the UK gaming industry as a whole.
The Bill presents specific provisions for three new types of casinos to operate in Britain. One "regional casino" will be permitted (most of us would recognize this as the Las Vegas style casino), along with eight large and eight small casinos. The basis for these categories of facilities is their square footage, the number of machines they can operate and the size of jackpots that they'll be allowed to offer.
At the time of this writing the government-appointed Casino Advisory Panel (CAP), headed by Prof Stephen Crow, a 72-year-old lay preacher, has gathered a short list of bids for the "regional" super-casino and is expected to file their report and recommendations with Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in the fourth quarter of 2006. The short listed candidate cities include Blackpool, Greenwich, Manchester, Sheffield, Cardiff, Newcastle, and Glasgow.
The location that wins the final bid is expected to benefit considerably from the estimated £355M (USD $675M) in development capital and 14,000 jobs created by the project.
As important as internet gambling is to those of us in the industry, it's also important to realize that the UK hasn't just written and passed an internet gambling law. The legislation is much more concerned about creating a workable industry as a whole rather than dealing with the details of one particular corner of it.
In fact, if you read the Bill, you'll find that the internet isn't really mentioned that much. That's because the ministers and MPs that wrote the Bill simply saw the internet as an extension of the gambling industry as a whole, not a special case that needed particular attention.
The bottom line is that the Bill says you need to provide such-and-such services and accountability whether you're opening a brick and mortar casino or a website. And, of course, you need a license from the government before you are permitted to do any such thing. The Bill makes a clear division between "gambling facilities" and "remote gambling" so the license issued to an operator will depend on the services they plan to offer. A license for one type of service will not apply to another type of service and the licenses will not be transferable from one type of service offering to another.
So what can the rest of us expect from the UK's bold new gambling future?
Obviously that's still an open question because nothing has actually happened yet, but the Bill does indicate the direction they plan to steer it in. It states that the Secretary of State will have powers to designate which places are prohibited territories and that an offence will be committed where a person in Great Britain uses remote gambling equipment for the purpose of "inviting or enabling a person in a prohibited territory to participate in remote gambling". In other words non-UK countries which choose to bar their citizens from accessing the new UK-licensed casinos will have an official channel through which to enforce that restriction. One can well imagine that the U.S., for instance, will do exactly that.
Official web resources for the UK Gambling Bill (2005):
House of Commons, Gambling Bill
The Gambling Commission
Casino Advisory Panel (CAP) website
Related resources:
BBC Q&A: The UK's first super casino
GamingFloor.com, a timeline of the Gambling Bill through parliament
For more information, click here.