Shared responsibility: Restrictions on winning bettors belong alongside regulatory friction in the debate over what drives consumers towards illegal gambling, according to former Gambling Commission executive director Tim Miller.

• Speaking to C+M, Miller, now a consultant focused on working with governments and regulators, acknowledged that regulation can displace customers from the licensed market.
• But operators would strengthen their case by accepting that their commercial decisions can have the same effect.
• “The risk is real,” he says. “All regulators have to be open to the risk that their approach could push people to the illegal market, and think about how to balance that against consumer protections.”

No fault divorce: The industry cannot expect regulators to examine the unintended consequences of their decisions without applying similar scrutiny to its own behavior, he suggests. “The other thing that didn’t help is that all the research shows a multitude of reasons why people end up going to the illegal market,” Miller says.

• “Regulatory factors could be part of that, but so could some of the commercial decisions operators make. We know that from research and from talking to consumers.”

You can’t do that: His clearest example concerns customers whose ability to bet is curtailed because they win. “For example, restricting successful punters: if you can’t get a bet on because you’ve been restricted for being a winning punter, you’ve only got one place to go, which is the illegal market,” he points out.

• These restrictions deserve a place in the discussion about keeping customers within licensed gambling, he says but he is careful to qualify their relative importance.
• “There’s a lack of willingness among parts of the industry to accept that this is also one of the drivers,” he said. “It may not be the main driver, but it’s certainly one of them.”

Push it to the limit: The implication is that the consequences of customer treatment extend beyond decisions explicitly labelled as regulatory or safer gambling interventions and that trading policies also shape the customer’s experience of the licensed market.

• “In the same way that industry rightly challenges regulators to minimize the risk of pushing people to the black market through regulation, industry needs to think about how to ensure its commercial decisions aren’t pushing people to the illegal market,” he says.

Street cred: Miller also suggests that the industry’s earlier approach to black market warnings made it harder to secure a hearing for legitimate concerns. Historically, at times, the industry “probably over-claimed,” he says.

• “It was almost as though any proposal that came forward would ‘push everyone to the illegal market’. That undermines the credibility of the legitimate argument I think they’re making at the moment,” he says.
• Miller’s criticism is directed at the type of sweeping claim that make it harder to establish which interventions create meaningful displacement risks.
• “If there’s a greater willingness for industry to talk about what it can do to reduce the risk of the black market, that would add credibility to what it’s saying and help get us to a position where we’re all pushing in the same direction,” he adds.

Beyond the blame game: That appeal reflects Miller’s broader frustration with the gambling debate after a decade at the Commission. He described a contested environment in which evidence is too often selected according to whether it supports an existing position.

• “All of us talk about the importance of evidence-based decisions,” he says.
• “But there are too many examples of both sides jumping on figures or evidence they like, and either rubbishing or ignoring the bits that don’t accord with their worldview,” he says.

Voices carry: Applied to the illegal market, his prescription requires regulators to acknowledge the risks created by their rules and operators to recognize those created by their business models. Neither side gets to treat displacement as solely somebody else’s problem.

• Miller sees some movement towards that conversation within the industry. “There are a number of voices in the industry starting to recognise that and wanting to talk about it,” he says.
• “If everyone involved can have an open mind about what more they can do to tackle the illegal market, we’re more likely to be successful.”

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