In the end the much-predicted tax raid on British gambling in yesterday’s swingeing £40 billion (US$51.83bn) budget didn’t materialise.
It was a bit like being blasted by a fiscal bomb that’s hit everybody around you but escaping, save for the excruciating white noise, totally unscathed.
Just what happened here?
Did all that schmoozing with Labour Party pals pay off.
Did ex-Blairite New Labour minister, now Chair of the gambling industry’s representative Betting and Gaming Council (BGC), Michael Dugher have a back-line to UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves?
Big Squeeze
Why did the country’s new prime minister Keir Starmer and his right-hand-woman, Reeves, the first-ever female chancellor, ignore the advice of Leftist think-tanks the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Social Market Foundation to put a £3 billion (US$3.88bn) squeeze on iGaming to part plug the so-called £22 billion (US$28.49bn) economic ‘black hole’ dug by successive Tory administrations?
Yes indeed.
But in a surprise move yesterday’s ‘Autumn Statement’, the first Labour Party budget in 14-years, revealed no tax rises for the nation’s betting industry.
Current tax rates–a 15 to 50 percent progressive imposition for bricks-and-mortar gambling and 21 percent for iGaming–will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
Reeves’ budget raised other taxes–Capital Gains, employer National Insurance contributions, crackdown on Non-doms, 20 percent VAT on private school fees, et al–by £40 billion but gambling, which already supports employment for around 110,000 people, contributes some £7.1 billion (US$9.2bn) to the wider economy and pays £4.2 billion (US$5.44bn) in tax annually, escaped attention in a financial plan designed to boost employment, the health service, public housing and social welfare.
Frozen
“The Gross Gaming Yield bandings for gaming duty will be frozen from 1 April 2025 until 31 March 2026,” the budget statement confirmed.
“We welcome today’s budget and its commitment to not increase gambling duties on the regulated betting and gaming sector,” said the BGC CEO Grainne Hurst, formerly Director of Corporate Affairs at Entain.
“We have been clear [in our belief that] any duty rises now would have hit customers, prevented growth, risked jobs and bolstered the unsafe, unregulated gambling black market.
“The Government has listened to the BGC and our members, got the balance right, and rejected calls from anti-gambling prohibitionists seeking to threaten jobs and growth.”
