PM Andy Burnham has announced that as part of his move to address social decay in town centers he is aiming to give local authorities greater powers to refuse licenses to new gambling premises.
What is actually being talked about here is removing the “aim to permit” which sits within the Licensing conditions attached to the Gambling Act 2005. The wording of this part of the Act has become a significant political topic of late with Town Halls pointing to it as being a barrier to them making licensing decisions on allowing new gambling premises which take into account social impact and possible harms to vulnerable local communities.
In a nutshell, the issue is that when the gambling act was drafted it was seen as an enabling piece of legislation, and the licensing powers which attached, and which were devolved by the Act to Local Authorities to administer, were worded in such a way as to give a legal duty to councils to accept any new licensing applications unless they acted against the three main principles underpinning the Gambling Act.
The problem with this wording was that none of these principles addressed possible local community issues or health needs. They simply covered the act of gambling itself, which meant that the only valid reason for refusing to grant a license would be if the Licensing committee had serious concerns that doing so may:
- make gambling a source of crime or disorder, or cause it to be being associated with crime or disorder
- prevent gambling being conducted in a fair and open way
- expose children and other vulnerable persons to being harmed or exploited by gambling
Valid concerns about how having multiple gambling premises located on High Streets might actually impact the lives of local people simply did not feature. With research consistently funding that gambling outlets – particularly Bookmaker shops, Adult Gaming Centres and Bingo Halls – tend to be disproportionately located in poorer and socially deprived areas rather than rich, affluent areas, it has been a growing area for concern to Local Authority leaders that having too many such businesses, and not being able to stop even more opening, was hindering attempts to address social harms present in some wards.
GLEN have for some time agreed that Town Halls should have ability to take community factors such as IMD (Index of Mass Deprivation) into account, and have the right to refuse applications where there was a reasonable case that approval was either non-beneficial or actively harmful to the communities they would be located in.
Various councils, including Brent, and some MPs such as Dawn Butler (Brent East), have been supported by Lived Experience experts in seeking to challenge this state of affairs. This week’s announcement by Andy Burnham suggests that their voices and concerns have been listened to.
It has however been met with some annoyance by gambling industry figures, including the Betting and Gaming Council, not so much for what was being announced but for how it was announced. By seeming to lump betting shops in with Vape shops and “rogue operators” they felt that this was painting an unfair picture of retail gambling which, when compared to vape shops, were already fully subject to strict licensing conditions and regulations.
They also pointed to the falling number of bookmakers retail premises as suggesting that rather than bookies taking over high streets they were in fact in danger of being legislated and taxed out of existence.
As ever it is useful to look behind the headline statistics and consider the facts as they can be ascertained.
It is true that in terms of overall numbers there has been a decline in High Street bookmakers outlets over recent years. The Gambling Commission report that in November 2025 there were 5,825 such premises licensed to operate. This represents a fall of 22.8% since the pandemic in 2000.
Nor is this decline likely to stop with BetFred already announcing an intention to close a further 130 shops, and William Hill intending to shut 200 of their shops.
But the reduction in numbers of traditional bookmakers is not the full picture, and the reasons being quoted by industry (increasing regulation and taxation) are also slightly misleading.
What is happening to retail gambling is that consumer shifts in behaviour away from in-person to remote activity is simply mirroring other retail trends, such as bookshops. Gen X, Y and Z are all much happier “shopping” online, and similarly happier betting online.
Regulation does also play a part, but probably not one the industry would be keen to flag up. Perhaps the biggest change to retail gambling came about when the Government bowed to Lived Experience led pressure and imposed a £2 stake limit on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FoBTs) in 2019. In a stroke that change in law acted to turn many low performing bookies in terms of overall betting activity into unsustainable businesses.
The (maximum) four FoBTs which each bookie had were effectively the cash cows justifying individual premises being open. With up to £100 being allowed to be staked per spin, and a new spin every few seconds, these machines disproportionately drew enough revenue from one aspect of retail gambling to compensate for less or unprofitable returns on other products. FoBTs were rightly called the “crack cocaine” of gambling simply because of how quickly they could deprive punters of their weekly (or even monthly) salaries. In an industry where harm mostly comes from intensity and speed of play they were the Ferrari’s of Harm.
Without them being nearly so profitable, due to the reduced £2 stake limit, the simple fact is that bookmakers have simply stopped getting enough customers through the door and using other products to make a high street presence economically viable. Part of this is business rates, part of it is National Insurance changes, and a large factor is the fixed price Media Rights costs for linking betting shops to race content providers. Recent changes to betting taxes, despite industry suggestions to the contrary, are very unlikely to have changed the viability of retail betting shops, but they may have acted to make operators reduce unprofitable areas of their business which they might previously have been willing to cross-subsidise from remote gambling revenues.
But… and there is always a but… the very same change in regulation which has brought about the rapid demise of bookies has also acted to increase the numbers of another gambling retail model.
Adult Gaming Centres – or AGCs – are the flip side of the retail gambling coin.
While the reduction in stakes for FoBTs has caused bookies to close in ever increasing numbers due to limited returns from a fixed number of B category gaming machines (maximum four per bookies) the rules which set out how many such machines can be housed in AGCs (based on ratio to other types rather than a maximum number) allows them to host far more of these £2 gaming machines, meaning that the revenues (or harm) which were concentrated in a relatively few FoBTs in bookie shops are now distributed across a larger number of machines in AGCs. They may not bring the same concentrated high turnover revenues as FoBTS did for bookmakers, and they may not (potentially) bankrupt punters quite so quickly, but with many AGCs being granted 24 hour operating licenses what they can do is “farm” customers for money over longer periods of time.
For the above reasons, many Local Authority leaders see any change to the “aim to permit” rules as having more impact in terms of ability to stop the growth of AGCs rather than in their ability to limit bookie numbers.
However, while GLEN fully supports this announcement, and would rightly give credit to many campaigners and Lived Experience voices who have led on raising this as an active community issue, we would also point out two possible stumbling blocks in making these changes as effective as we would probably all like.
The first being that while removal of the “aim to permit” will hopefully allow Town Halls to prevent further gambling licenses being issued in areas where they feel there is no community benefit to be gained from having them, there is as yet no suggestion that councils will be given powers to revoke existing licenses. What we foresee happening is a rush to set up AGCs before any such change in rules comes into effect, and if we are being frank, it may be that even without such a surge in applications for many of our more deprived communities the number of gambling outlets they are exposed to is already excessively harmful.
The second possible challenge comes from how this removal of the “aim to permit” will be effected. As it forms part of existing primary legislation it may be that to achieve the stated objective it might require a full debate in Parliament, or even new primary legislation.
The downside of this may be excessive delay in getting this in place. The upside is that should debates be required, and especially is new legislation is needed, then this might create scope for other concerns around harms caused by gambling to be brought to the political table.
On the face of it this seems news worth celebrating, but as with the shift from bookies to AGCs there is a tendency that what regulation brings with one hand it can also often act to take away.
All we can do for now monitor the situation, suggest best ways of implementing changes which minimise the risk of harm innovating around the outcomes, and remaining vigilant and hopeful.