At a crossroads: the future of RET funding

The gambling research, education and treatment (RET) sector is in a delicate position, with major changes on the horizon to the way it attracts funding. In its current form, gambling operators are encouraged to donate a minimum of 0.1% of their annual gross gambling yield (GGY) to GambleAware, the UK’s leading gambling harm-focused charity. Those who generate less than £250,000 in GGY annually are asked to donate a minimum of £250. But some question how the funds are allocated.

While operators contributed £33.8m between January to March 2023 to GambleAware, Deal Me Out was given a paltry £41,644 in comparison. It’s worth noting that organisations receive most of their funding in the first quarter of a calendar year, once operators have a clearer picture of their respective GGY for the financial year (April to March).     

The RET list, which consists of 29 organisations including charities GamCare, Gambling Harm UK and Betblocker, as well as GambleAware, is extremely likely to be disbanded as the levy switches from voluntary funding to mandatory, one of the key points detailed in the UK government’s white paper into the Gambling Act 2005 review published at the end of April. Once the levy is in place, which GambleAware says will raise £140m a year if a 1% levy on GGY is applied, the Gambling Commission (GC) will collect the money and redistribute it depending on where the UK government believes it is needed.

What has been stated – although those who EGR has spoken to believe this won’t come to fruition – is that operators can still donate funds to charities outside of the approved RET list but it just won’t count towards the required licence conditions and code of practice put in place.

As the industry continued its wait for the levy’s introduction two organisations were on the brink of collapse, with one eventually shuttering citing lack of funding among a host of other reasons. Deal Me Out, which the GC classes as a community interest company, was the first to close down in May, though CEO Jordan Lea did say it would continue to run its crisis website for a further two years via funding from Playtech and Metropolitan Gaming. However, at the 11th hour the Welsh firm was saved, thanks to funding from Genting Casinos.

The same cannot be said for education platform Nowt Left To Lose. Its closure was announced in July, and CEO Ryan Pitcher took to LinkedIn to not only provide the update but to also go public with what he has witnessed and heard during his time in the gambling-harm prevention space.

Pitcher posted an open letter to GC CEO Andrew Rhodes on the platform, voicing his concerns about what he described as “shady stuff” happening in the industry. He also made a series of accusations against the RET sector, including misappropriation of funds and personal attacks against himself from unnamed persons. However, he did make sure to emphasize that there are good people working on this side of the industry.

When speaking to EGR three weeks later, Pitcher says he received an email from the GC when he requested to be removed from the RET list because he was closing the business. Yet he claims neither Rhodes nor anyone else at the UK regulator reached out to him following his open letter, despite saying he sent a separate email direct to the CEO. He doubled down on what he wrote in his open letter, giving examples that cannot be printed for legal reasons of how his brief time in the gambling harm space was, as he describes it, a “nightmare”.

He says: “I set up Nowt Left To Lose at the start of last year and essentially got funding outside of RET from a gambling operator. I managed to get [an operator outside of RET] to support me with a little grant. So, obviously all of that went into the programme launch, and it was just a nightmare really from then. I managed to get on to the RET list, having gone through several months of arduous bits back and forth.”

Nightmare is a word that comes up a lot when Pitcher is reflecting on his brief stint on the RET list. It became clearer with every passing sentence that he didn’t think securing funding or operating in this space would be that difficult. As Pitcher continues talking, there are more accusations including RET organisations not paying their staff/consultants and further claims that it was difficult for his organisation to receive funding.

“From a funding perspective, I filled out so many funding applications,” he says. “I thought it should be, not necessarily simple, but fairly easy to get some funding through the door, especially for some of the stuff we were targeting.”

Pitcher isn’t the only person involved in the RET sector who has been outspoken in public about the current state of the industry. Duncan Garvie founded, and is a trustee of, software company BetBlocker, a free app which restricts your device from gaining access to gambling operators for between 24 hours to five years. Garvie posted several articles online from the middle of April detailing his reasons why the RET system in its existing format is “broken” and the struggling nature of RET-approved organisations when it comes to obtaining funding. He added that the current system is “undermining the support that these organisations provide”.

Despite the incoming switch from a voluntary donation to a compulsory one for operators, Pitcher is sceptical things will improve for smaller charities and gambling-harm prevention organisations, noting that it is likely to become even harder for startups to acquire funding as those holding the purse strings will no longer feel the need to give money to anyone other than GambleAware. He claims operators are used to the way things are, and is of the opinion it never really was a voluntary levy despite pointing out firms were giving more money to a charity that already had millions of pounds sitting in its bank account.

The word nightmare comes up again, which isn’t surprising when you listen and read what Pitcher says he has experienced. He explains: “When speaking to operators, it was a nightmare. Very few of them wanted to veer away from donating to GambleAware, which I found a really difficult pill to swallow. Speaking to high-up people at operators, a lot of them thought they had to [donate] as opposed to it being a voluntary system. And they were, I’d say, very reluctant to move away from that.”     

Follow the money   

GambleAware released its fiscal Q1 donations list at the end of July, just a day before the GC committed £32.8m of regulatory settlements to the charitable body, allowing the GC to create a “system stabilisation fund” during the levy’s transitional period. When asked about the announcement, Pitcher shakes his head. While he admits he is sceptical about this, he finds it “crazy” that there is no governance around where the money is allocated and claims that if you look back at historical regulatory settlements – you can see who receives the funding online – you can’t find any impact having been made in relation to where the money has been spent. “It beggars belief,” he says.

Meanwhile, Garvie had a similar reaction to Pitcher but brought up the regulatory settlement in a different context. When talking about how much it would have cost to keep the lights on at Nowt Left to Lose and Deal Me Out for a year, even though the latter was rescued, Garvie notes it would have been a “slither” of the money handed to GambleAware.

He says: “I think the regulator and GambleAware should have stepped in far earlier to ensure these RET-approved organisations did not go under for what are trivial sums of money. I mean, genuinely trivial money when we are considering that GambleAware have just been given a pot of £33m and either of these organisations could have been saved for £100,000. [They] could have been given a life for the next year for £100,000 while we actually review the system and determine whether it’s working.”

Robert Mabbett, engagement director at gambling harm organisation Better Change, commented on the rapid increase in funding towards RET of gambling harm – writing in a LinkedIn post of the £50.5m rise since November 2022 from £48.7m in the previous three-and-a-half years. And it raised a few questions for the former gambling-harm charity Gordon Moody employee.

Mabbett doesn’t believe that the “wealth” has been shared out when you consider regulatory settlements and RET funding is over £200m in three-and-a-half years. That the figure doesn’t include charitable trust foundations, pots of money that have been donated through dormant gambling accounts – 888 gave £113,714 to GambleAware during its fiscal Q1 (1 April to 30 June) from dormant accounts – or traditional charity activity.

Mabbett says: “We’ve got to know where that money is going, what it’s doing and what it’s preventing. Why are we struggling with startups now when we were doing absolutely fine with startups three or four years ago when there was a 10th of that money in the pot? Something’s not right. Where is the money going?”

However, he is of the opinion the blame does not lie with those at the top, industry trade body Betting Gaming Council (BGC) and the GC. He makes a point to say that the BGC have told the big operators that money needs investing in RET and that they have “done well”.

“It’s easy to point the finger at them, and it always seems to be the people in charge, but what are some of those organisations who have been fortunate to get some pretty big funding [on paper], where’s the output? If two or three years ago someone said they’re going to do an 18-month project researching something, then where is it?”

In a statement supplied to EGR, the GC said it has a “robust process for the approval of destinations of regulatory settlements, which ensures that only projects that meet the criteria are able to receive funds”. The regulator added: “When a project is approved, it is matched with outstanding funds and payment is arranged. The Gambling Commission does not carry out or commission evaluations of projects ourselves as this would require us to divert licence fee money from regulatory activities. Organisations build evaluation approaches and costs into their proposals and are responsible for implementing these.”

As for GambleAware’s role, the GC said that with the charity being a “strategic commissioner across sector”, it means GambleAware is able to apply “a single overview of the system”. The GC added: “With this oversight, GambleAware can provide some stability to the system during the transition period until a statutory levy is implemented.”

GambleAware didn’t respond when EGR asked for an interview or comment. With it already being confirmed that the RET list in its current form will be disbanded once the mandatory levy is introduced, it begs the question: why can’t the list and a compulsory levy co-exist?

For Garvie, it can, and it would make the most sense. “You’re absolutely spot on the money,” he replies when the question is put forward to him. He explains that the current RET system could have easily operated at current levels on a mandatory basis. Those donations which had already been made to GambleAware could have continued, and any excess voluntary funding may have been passed to companies on the RET list.

Despite his support for the current system, Garvie criticises the need he feels to constantly build and maintain relationships in order to secure funding, with a pronounced need to extol the virtue of each project. “Trying to demonstrate the value we bring to the system was not easy, but it was working. So yes, the two could easily have co-existed. Instead, we’ve just switched from one to the other. It’s a shame there’s no compromise,” he adds.

Unsurprisingly, though, there’s no support from Pitcher on the current system. “Is it broken? Crikey, massively. It’s got a crater in it. How to fix it? I honestly don’t know.”

As for Mabbett, he is adamant that the incoming levy will be transformative: no RET funding means no RET list. But it comes back down to decisions and funding being made public so the industry knows who is eligible to receive money and everyone is given a “fair crack” at being able to do that work.

He says: “It’s a natural presumption that the RET list as it is will become defunct because there’s a mandatory levy, but we don’t know who’s owning that levy. We don’t know how that’s going to be collected from the industry and then distributed. We don’t know what projects are going to be run through that levy.”

Given that right now no one has the answers to a lot of the questions being posed, it’s up to those in charge of this switch to ensure that it is fair, transparent and resolves lingering queries quickly to avoid the mistakes of the past.