ONE-ON-ONE
Winning by working together TIM MILLER , EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AT THE UK GAMBLING COMMISSION, TALKED TO EDITOR-IN CHIEF SIMON PLANZER ABOUT THE BLACK MARKET, RESEARCH FUNDING AND GREATER SUPPORT FOR THE REGULATED MARKET. Simon Planzer: Let's start with some details about you. What does your Executive Director role entail?
them from being able to keep pace with changes that are happening in the industry that they regulate. In general, the Gambling Act enabled us to be able to adjust regulation to suit the circumstances and the reality of the world that we were regulating. That's probably one of the reasons why it has stood the test of time. Typically, big pieces of legislation don’t survive unchanged for as long as the Gambling Act has. The fact that there haven't been significant changes to the legislation in all that time is probably testament to the good job Parliament did at the time. The other big success for the British gambling market is the fact that I think it allowed a diverse and very competitive market to develop. It's one of the reasons why I think we have historically had pretty good channelization rates here compared to some other jurisdictions, because most normally accepted forms of gambling are licensed and regulated. Here in the UK, there's a huge amount of consumer choice. So now, almost anything that a consumer would reasonably want to do within the gambling market, they're able to do here within an environment that's well regulated. That is something that a lot of jurisdictions look at. I know when talking to folks in the United States, for
Tim Miller: I have a pretty broad portfolio comprising policy, research and statistics which has included overseeing the implementation of the UK government's Gambling White Paper. For the last year or so I’ve also been acting executive director for operations, which covers all key regulatory functions: licensing, compliance, enforcement and so on. I also head up a new illegal markets program, funded by the additional government resource that was announced in the budget. It sounds a lot but it’s a really enjoyable job, but then my first job was regulating lawyers. After that everything else is easy. SP: The UK is a long-standing regulated market and widely seen as a successful one. What is it about the market structure, the regulation or the way it has been managed that have been pivotal to that success? TM: I think there are a few things. The first is that the 2005 Gambling Act was quite an enabling piece of legislation. Having worked in lots of regulators, there’s sometimes a frustration when the legislation ties the regulator’s hands and prevents
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IMGL MAGAZINE | MARCH 2026
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