After seemingly aeons of leak and speculation the ground-shifting British Budget is nigh, amid very real fears that big much-touted hikes in gaming taxes will forever change the face–and reality–of national gambling.
If gaming taxes are hiked–as championed by former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown and a coalition of powerful backbench socialist party MPs and leftist social policy think-tanks–the immediate most likely outcome is the closure of hundreds, if not thousands, of UK High Street bookies – the iconic, and by many accounts beloved, face of British betting.
Betfred, Evoke, Entain, all three big-hitting omnichannels have warned as much, as reported in these pages.
Horseracing, after fierce lobbying by powerful and influential pro-racing stakeholders, is likely to escape the gambling tax coup.
Tax Targets
But it would appear that levies on retail machine gambling and an increase in non-horse racing sports betting are frontline tax targets.
Led by the representative Betting and Gaming Council, the UK gambling industry, the richest and arguably most socially progressive betting sector in Europe, has not been recalcitrant in warning that higher taxes will only kill the golden gambling goose and drive even more punters away from the safer regulated market into the arms of off-shore Bad Boys.
Ironically, and on a more positive note, within the UK gambling industry the big winner–or perhaps the lesser loser–will be iGaming, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Budget hyper-powering the switch from retail to online we saw during Covid.
Taxes? For many they’ve been likened to a virus.
We’ll have the result, positive or negative, by lunchtime.
