Gambling Commission

[apracing]

In a BF forum thread discussing the story about the head of the BHA falling foul of affordability checks, someone asked the interesting question of whether we could afford the Gambling Commission. It got me thinking and prompted me to have a dig into the publicly available information in their published annual reports.

What I found was the usual tale of a bureaucratic organisation growing like bindweed, both in terms of the numbers employed and the costs. Using the most recent report for the financial year 2023/24, I compared that to the same report from ten years previously.

In 2014, the GC had 224 staff, at a total cost of £9.98M. In 2024 that had risen to 363 staff, at a cost of £23.3M. What on earth do they all do, apart from interfere in the lives of people that don’t have and never had a gambling problem.

The head man, Andrew Rhodes, was paid (I hesitate to use earned) a salary in the £185k – £190k range – they seem oddly coy about providing a specific figure. He also received a bonus of between £10k and £15k. But quite the most alarming figure, at least to someone not familiar with the benefits of public sector employment, was the number stated as ‘Pension Benefits’ – for Rhodes that was £82,000 in 2023/24 – and £84,000 in 2022/23.

When you think how many hundreds, if not thousands, of these unelected bodies are now controlling our lives, and multiply the numbers reported above, the pension liabilities alone must represent a massive problem for the years ahead.

,

[Cork All Star]

Good to see it is spending our money so wisely:

Gambling Commission Spends £216,000 Procuring Procurement Cards

[Blackcountry Kid]

I actually went to their offices once in a vain attempt to get to speak to someone.
Had a whole list of questions to put to whoever I was allowed to talk with.
Mostly general ones around betting,on horses in particular,but the one I wanted answered most of all was why do they treat all punters as though they are gambling addicts?
I was refused entry …. they even called security to escort me out the door!
Reality has yet to penetrate their ivory tower while they refuse to speak to the general public.
good luck to all

[Author]

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