The new body is intended to improve the regulator’s understanding of operators’ views.
UK.- The British Gambling Commission has created a new ten-member body named the Industry Forum, which it intends to use to improve its understanding of operators’ views. It says it will begin looking for a chair for the body this month. The chair will be appointed for a three-month term.
The forum joins other stakeholder engagement initiatives and advisory groups such as the regulator’s Lived Experience Advisory Panel and Advisory Board for Safer Gambling. The Gambling Commission’s chairman Marcus Boyle said it would provide the regulator with a new way to communicate with the industry.
He said: “We’ve always listened to the views of the industry when deciding how best to make progress but this new forum will give us another way to work with representatives from the industry we regulate,” he said.
The creation of the new body comes after the Gambling Commission’s CEO Ian Rhodes criticised “misinformation” about its proposals for affordability checks, or financial risk checks.
Rhodes recently described the regulator’s work on financial risk checks as the “most challenging part of what we’re doing”. In the new blog post, he said that there has been “a significant amount of misinformation… in direct responses to the consultation, in the media and on social media”.
The Gambling Commission launched four consultations in July. These propose age verification requirements for land-based gambling venues, rules for online game design, measures on direct marketing and cross-selling and, most controversially, financial risk checks or affordability checks.
