Gambling Commission

What this authority does

The Gambling Commission was created by the Gambling Act 2005 and began licensing in 2007, replacing the Gaming Board for Great Britain. Its defining feature is the point-of-consumption principle: since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, any operator taking bets from customers in Great Britain needs a British licence regardless of where the company and its servers sit. Before that change, operators could serve British customers from a licence granted elsewhere in Europe, and most did.

Licensing is only part of the remit. The commission also licenses individuals, not just companies: anyone holding a senior role with responsibility for compliance, finance or marketing needs a personal management licence in their own name, which means a named person can be sanctioned when a company fails. Its licence conditions and codes of practice document, usually shortened to LCCP, is the operative rulebook, and it is amended far more often than the Act itself.

Enforcement is by regulatory settlement or financial penalty rather than prosecution in most cases, and the published settlements are one of the more useful sources on how compliance failures actually happen: almost all of them turn on customer-interaction records, source-of-funds checks or self-exclusion failures rather than on game fairness.

Licences it issues

• Remote operating licence
• Non-remote operating licence
• Personal management licence
• Personal functional licence

What supervision concentrates on

• Licensing of operators and software suppliers
• Personal licensing of senior staff
• Anti-money-laundering supervision
• Advertising and promotional standards
• The National Lottery

Markets on file under this authority