The Gambling Commission’s Tim Miller has accused sections of the betting industry of misrepresenting proposed financial risk assessments by describing them as affordability checks. And his point is? Clearly not that they’re an overreach, unpopular with players and so intrusive that they’re driving people to the black market. Mr Miller is in reflective … sorry, we mean deflective mode. Again.
Speaking at the Ethical Gambling Forum in Leeds, executive director Tim Miller defended the planned ‘financial risk assessments’, which would use credit reference data to identify customers potentially facing financial difficulty.
And boy does he have to. The checks are under fire from all quarters: from every sector in the industry all the way down to the spikey little prohibitionists at the Social Market Foundation who have done a massive U-turn and reversed their original pro-affordability rhetoric straight back up the passage they had spouted it from a couple of years ago.
Not only were affordability checks never going to work, they actually aren’t working. And Mr Miller seems to be the only one in the room that doesn’t see it.
No surprise really, because he’s main concern seems to be that nobody’s calling the checks by the Commission’s favoured title – financial risk assessments.
Even for Tim Miller, that is a disappointing sleight of hand comment.
Language huh? You say to-may-to, we say to-mah-to… let’s call the whole thing off. And that is precisely what Miller is being urged to do immediately.
Talking to delegates at the Forum, the executive director stated: “Frankly, it would be a bit like calling an eye exam a prostate exam.”
Interesting analogy, do explain Doctor Do-Miller.
“They’re quite different things,” he advised the audience. “And one is much less invasive than the other. Calling it something doesn’t make it true.”
Perhaps he should try both and report back to us?
The affordability checks – which is what everybody rightly calls them – were proposed in the 2023 Gambling Act white paper and recently completed a pilot scheme.
Miller insisted the system would not assess how much consumers could afford to gamble. “We want to be really clear – if we decide to go ahead with what’s been piloted, no consumer will have their affordability assessed through that,” he continued. “There is really no element of affordability in it.”
Now, let us be really clear, anyone who says let’s “be really clear” is actually being the complete opposite.
And the critics agree: they have warned the measures could push gamblers towards illegal operators. One industry source claimed: “Rushing these now will send customers into the open arms of the very same illegal operators the regulator swears it wants to stop.”
The Gambling Commission said its board would decide the next steps “in the near future”.
And here we go again, another GamCom misstep. Is that the same Gambling Commission board that has no chief executive in place and no chairman in office?
Now, let’s be really clear – that sounds like a cracking idea. Until you think it through: would you give such important regulatory decisions to a rudderless board with no-one in charge.
Oh…you probably would.
As clear as mud
Tim Miller said……. “We want to be really clear – if we decide to go ahead with what’s been piloted, no consumer will have their affordability assessed through that. There is really no element of affordability
in it…
Originally published on Coinslot on May 11, 2026. Republished with permission.