Across all disciplines, retail businesses continue to face dire conditions led by inflation, higher operating cost, rising rents, tax changes and price sensitive consumers.

In the UK alone, the roll call of collapsed retailers includes Debenhams, Wilko, the Arcadia Group (owner of Topshop, Topman, and Dorothy Perkins), Gap, and Mothercare. For retail bookmakers, changes to regulations and tax are making this even more difficult.

Betfred stands as the UK’s largest retail betting estate with over 1,300 shops across the country – but the future of its huge retail portfolio is at risk. A couple of weeks before warning The Sunday Times about the impact tax raise could have on this estate, Betfred CEO Joanne Whittaker spoke with SBC News in Lisbon.

Betting and the budget

There is no escaping the Autumn Statement as the prominent concern, as leadership is forced to determine the direct impact of Labour’s tax treatment on their business and day-to-day operations.

“Retail is hard, because costs on the high street continue to increase,” Whittaker told us.

“These are fixed costs, there’s nothing we can do, but we had a massive hit this year with national insurance changes and minimum wage particularly, plus the voluntary levy. We’ve been hit with a lot of costs in retail.

“We will always be passionate retailers and we will continue to invest in our retail estate, but it is difficult and it is on our mind. It is part of our board discussions regularly, how do we manage it and what do we do?”

Although it may not seem like it due to almost every major high street in the UK usually possessing a couple of different betting shops, the challenges faced by the retail betting space are plain to see. Consumers are increasingly turning to online betting, and the costs of operating a large retail chain are mounting.

Figures from the UK Gambling Commission have further hammered this home. Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) data showed online participation far outweighed retail participation, and betting premises’ gross gaming yield for Q1 2024/25 dropped 5% year-over-year while for online it grew 2%.

On top of retail’s general struggles, exacerbated by the COVID pandemic lockdowns a few years ago, some politicians are now turning against the sector. Labour MPs and over 38 local authorities have been calling for local governments to be granted more powers to cut back the presence of betting and gaming venues on their high streets.

An often repeated argument is that betting shops and particularly adult gaming centres (AGCs) are disproportionately located in low income areas. While the industry will argue this is due to lower rent costs, critics see it as an inherently predatory practice.

“We’re not opening new shops, we might move an existing one but I think the political pressure is more about AGCs rather than betting shops,” Whittaker said.

“We look at what an appropriate place for a shop is and any customers in it are protected by the safer gambling measures we have in place.

“We’re part of the community quite often. Customers will come and have a cup of tea and sit with us for hours and not spend a fortune. Staff know our regular customers by their first name – people want to go, there’s a social aspect.”

All of this aside, the industry’s main concern right now is not politicians’ opinions on where betting shops are located or whether consumers are turning away from retail, it is the topic we addressed at the start of this conversation, tax.

Will the tax burden sink retail?

On 26 November, Rachel Reeves, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, will announce the Autumn budget, the package of fiscal policies the Labour government plans to implement based on economic forecasts.

While HM Treasury has discouraged what it calls ‘speculation’, an increase in betting taxes is widely anticipated. A widely touted proposal would see the three types of gaming duty merged into one 21% rate – the already 21% remote gaming duty and the 15% general betting duty and pool betting duty.

More than 100 Labour MPs are now calling for this, backing former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s argument that an increase in gaming duty could pay for the two-child benefit limit to be scrapped, subsequently alleviating childhood poverty levels.

A far more drastic option, which is also being widely touted, is for general betting duty on sports betting to rise to 30%, machine games duty on slots to go up from 20% to 50%, and remote gaming duty to go from 21% to 50%.

Betfred, Evoke and Entain have all warned that shop closures could result from this – though given the general struggles faced by UK retail, this could have been the case anyway. In Betfred’s case, the firm has warned of a worst case scenario in which it shuts down its entire retail estate, its core product.

“We will always put the customer at the forefront and will continue to invest in that, but the hard economics, the costs of the high street, the taxes up for debate at the moment – we have to look at the other economics of that,” Whittaker said.

Taxes, general retail costs, and changing customer behaviour have been making Betfred think about “what a shop will look like in the future”, its CEO shared, with the added challenge of attracting a younger audience to retail, another element to consider.

“Is that just not what they want?” Whittaker queried, adding: “These are all important discussions we’re having and considering at the moment, but we’ve never switched off from retail, it’s our heritage and who we are.

“It helps with our brand recognition. We’re on 1,300 high streets throughout the UK, everyone’s heard of Betfred, and that gives us bigger opportunities online to leverage the brand.”

Core product under pressure

The tax discussions have not just got bookmakers talking, but horse racing as well. If anything the sport has been more vocal than betting, initiating its ‘AxeTheRacingTax’ campaign and going as far as to call a strike in early September.

This latter action was not well received by the betting industry. It appears that though both betting and racing want the same outcome – an unchanged tax framework – the two sectors are not entirely on the same page about how this should be achieved.

Whittaker offered her own view on the racing strike: “It was very frustrating that we weren’t consulted in any way. It didn’t hurt us too much, but It would have been nice to have been part of the conversation because we put so much into racing through taxes, levy payments, sponsorship, and we should be working together.”

For bookmakers like Betfred, horse racing leadership’s course of action may have stung even more because of how significant a product the sport is to the retail sector. Horse racing is the very foundation of retail betting, offering a constant stream of betting markets to shop punters ever since Britain’s legal market was launched back in 1960.

Betfred itself has been an active partner of the sport. Whittaker asserted that the company’s sponsorship of the five Classic fixtures this year, for example, is “very important to us and to Fred (Done)”.

“We’re the first sponsor to have sponsored all five, and we’re trying to support racing and elevate racing,” Whittaker put it plainly.

Despite this difference of opinion between bookmakers and racing, Betfred’s CEO was reluctant to describe it as a “disagreement” when asked by SBC, stating “we’ve not really discussed or agreed an approach collaboratively”.

Whittaker did, however, state that “it’s dangerous that horse racing is looking to just protect horse racing”, asserting that a collaborative effort will be needed for both industries to properly get their point across.

On the sport’s significance as a betting product, she added: “It’s our whole business and that enables us to reinvest in things like sponsorship. Racing is an important product to us, but it is also a really expensive product.

“We need to look at how to focus our marketing efforts, and we need to work together on what that approach should be.”

Racing and retail betting share some parallels in that both have faced tough years. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a blow to both, while racing has struggled with attendances in the same way retail has struggled with customer numbers.

Despite some differences in how the tax hikes are being addressed, racecourses and bookmakers still have common goals, with both recognising the significance of the other to their respective businesses.

A planned event at York Racecourse involving Flutter Entertainment and the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) is indicative of this, and Betfred’s Whittaker also has a clear desire to see a horse racing revamp.

“We need to work together to attract a new audience while working to support the existing audience,” she told SBC. “We need to look at the product and how we can make it more interesting – look at the football markets and bet builders, the stat-based products and analysis that people are betting on, and how we are looking at those kinds of products.”

While a multi-billion pound enterprise, Betfred declared losses of £71m in 2023 and £35m in 2024, but has also been flexing its status as one of Britain’s biggest tax payers – founder Fred Done has paid £273.4m to the Treasury in 2025 alone, according to The Sunday Times tax list.

The coming months will prove to be testing times for Betfred. The financial burden of heavier taxation is likely to lead to some difficult decisions needing to be made, and the company is not alone in this regard.

Entain, Flutter and Evoke will all have to make tough calls about the future of their retail estates, while mid-sized firms and new market entrants such as Midnite will also have to adjust strategies. 26 November has the potential to be day one of a new era of British betting, whether the industry likes it or not.