Betting shops down, FOBT revenues up
According to a new report by the UK Gambling Commission, Britons shattered gambling records last year, wagering £12.6 billion (US$16.7 billion) for the 12 months leading to September 2015.
Of the total bets, £3.6 billion was spent on online gambling, £3.3 billion on the National Lottery and £3.2 billion in betting shops, for an average of about £500 per year for every household in the country, reported Casino.org.
The latest annual increase, up from £11.2 billion in September 2014, was due in part to the first-time inclusion of a full year of statistics for online gamblers, who lost a combined £3.6 billion, reported the Guardian. Bettors spent £3.3 billion on web-based casino games, sports betting and bingo, more than the amount spent on the National Lottery, the newspaper reported.
“For the first time the figures include almost a full year’s worth of data relating to online gambling operators; the market share of the online betting, bingo and casino sector is 29 percent and we’ll be interested to see how this varies over time,” said UKGC Program Director James Green.
Despite numerous reports decrying the proliferation of high street bookies, the report also indicates that the number of betting shops has actually dropped since 2014, with 200 shops closing due to higher taxes, regulation and competition from online gambling. Even so, land-based bookmaker revenue remained steady due to a higher yield for fixed-odds betting terminals, which accounted for 56 percent of the betting shops’ profits, bringing in $1.7 billion—another record, though the number of FOBTs has also dropped from 35,067 to 34,809.
The machines have been called “the crack cocaine of betting” by politicians, gambling critics and the news media because they allow customers to stake £100 every 20 seconds on electronic roulette and other games. Critics have demanded that lawmakers slash the maximum stake from £100 to just £2 in an effort to limit the amount that problem gamblers can lose. In one case earlier this year, the newspaper reported, Paddy Power made a “voluntary payment” of £280,000 after the Gambling Commission found it had encouraged a problem gambler to “keep betting until he lost five jobs, his home and access to his children.”
