Despite a delay of more than two years, Sarah Fox, the deputy director of the UK’s Department for Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS), asked the industry to remain patient with the reform process.
Fox, who has been in her position since June 2022, spoke at the ICE Vox World Regulatory on Monday and told those in attendance to remain engaged and continue to communicate with policy makers.
“My big ask of you today is to keep engaged, as you have done over the previous stages of the review, and that counts for international colleagues as well”, Fox said. “We’ve had some really great submissions to our call for evidence from international counterparts, where we could reflect on different circumstances, different policy positions, lessons in your jurisdictions, which are really invaluable to us.”
Fox also addressed the department’s White Paper on gambling reform, which was promised to be weeks away when she was hired but still hasn’t been published.
“It was such a critical time when I first joined the team,” Fox said. “We were just about to publish the White Paper, the biggest review of gambling regulation that we’ve had in Britain. We were literally weeks away and it’s stayed weeks away for the last seven months.”
Fox hinted that the White Paper may actually be “weeks away” from publication.
“We’re looking to make the changes right, deliver the intended policy outcomes, and hopefully future-proof the framework for future generations”, she said. “We know that the world itself is innovating so quickly that it’s very hard to keep regulation and legislation in line. We really need to make this as flexible as possible, so that we can try and pre-empt some of those changes.”
Critics, however, said that the information that would be in the document might already be obsolete. W2 Chief Executive Warren Russell told CDC Gaming Reports that there could be out of date information.
“The call for evidence was two and a half years ago. I think it’s out of date,” Russell said. “One thing that has changed is that we know we are now in a position where we can know more. Technology advances at such a rapid rate that we can really utilize the data points that we’ve mentioned — banking information, blockchain capabilities, and storing information on the ledger to be retrievable.”
