The Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) has told SBC News that it is keeping “all options” open as the Gambling Commission presses ahead with plans to implement the most stringent level of customer finance checks.

On Tuesday 7 July, the Commission announced that Financial Risk Assessments (FRAs) are now in the pipeline. FRAs are the second of two layers to finance risk checks, the most widely used and least stringent being Financial Vulnerability Checks (FVCs).

“We are considering the Commission’s latest announcement and all options available to us,” a BGC spokesperson told SBC News.

“No decisions have been taken at this stage.”

The measures have been colloquially called ‘affordability checks’ by the industry and gambling law reform advocates since the early days of the 2020-2023 review of the 2005 Gambling Act. 

The White Paper on this review proposed financial risk checks when published in April 2023.

Over the following years, this concept has morphed into FVCs and FRAs – the former being ‘light-touch’, implemented after a net loss of £150 within 30 days, and use public data to identify at-risk customers.

The Commission plans for the FRA programme to be initially applied to the UK’s largest operators – think bet365, Entain brands like Ladbrokes Coral, Flutter Entertainment’s brands like Sky Bet and Betfair, and evoke’s William Hill, to name some of the biggest.

FRAs are intended to assess only the highest spending customer brackets, set at net deposits of £5,000 over a 24-hour period. The Commission has long maintained that this will impact only a very small minority of British bettors.

However, the BGC has been deeply opposed from the outset. 

Ahead of an expected decision in May, which was ultimately delayed by the Commission, the BGC made it clear it was open to using legal action to prevent FRAs being implemented – it appears that this is not off the table.

Racing and betting patch up tax row to battle FRAs

Also bitterly opposed to FRAs and the concept of ‘affordability checks’ in general is horse racing, with opposition largely led by the British Horseracing Authority (BHA).

Horse racing depends heavily on its symbiotic relationship with the betting industry for its finances, through the horse racing betting levy, sponsorship deals, and media rights payments, to name a few examples.

Horse racing betting also counts high-roller VIP punters as a very lucrative revenue source, particularly for mid-level bookmakers. Horse racing and bookmakers, particularly these mid-tier ones, are concerned that FRAs could push this demographic away from the industry.

SBC News understands that the BHA has been working closely with the BGC while the latter considers “all options” outlined above.

Unified opposition to FRAs seems to have united the two organisations, which had a bit of a falling out last year over how best to oppose the government’s then-still-in-discussion tax regime. 

The BHA’s decision to call a horse racing strike on 10 September 2025 was criticised extensively by the BGC, as the betting trade body had not been consulted prior.