UKGC Withholds Decade of Underage Gambling Data

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UKGC Unable to Quantify Historical Underage Gambling Complaints

The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has been unable to provide comprehensive data on underage gambling incidents, complaints, and related enforcement actions spanning a ten-year period, a recent Freedom of Information (FOI) disclosure reveals. The regulator withheld the information, stating that the cost and time required to retrieve it from its systems would exceed legal limits.

This response highlights a significant gap in the public availability of long-term data concerning one of the industry's most critical player protection issues.

The Request and the Response

The FOI request, dated 4 November 2025, asked for specific figures from 2014 to 2024 on:

• The number of incidents, complaints, or enforcement actions related to under-18s gambling.
• Details of fines or penalties issued to operators for failures in age verification.
• The number of complaints received from parents or guardians about underage gambling.

In its response, the Commission confirmed that it holds information within the scope of the request. However, it explained that retrieving this data would be prohibitively resource-intensive. The UKGC cited Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, which allows public bodies to refuse requests where the cost of compliance exceeds £450, equivalent to 18 hours of staff time.

The primary reason for the refusal stems from the regulator's historical data management. The UKGC stated that prior to 2016, consumer complaints were not categorised separately but were logged under a general 'General Enquiry' heading. To fulfil the request, staff would need to manually review every 'general enquiry' from 2014 and 2015 to identify relevant cases, a task deemed too costly and time-consuming.

What This Means for Consumers

Transparency around underage gambling is crucial for parents, consumer protection groups, and the public to assess the effectiveness of regulation and operator controls. The inability to easily access a decade's worth of specific complaint data makes it difficult to analyse long-term trends or measure the scale of the problem as reported directly to the regulator.

While the UKGC assures that it uses all information it receives to inform its regulatory work and build cases against non-compliant operators, this response shows that its historical data systems were not designed for granular analysis of specific complaint types.

The Commission did note that its recording methods have changed over time to better support its regulatory functions, suggesting that data from 2016 onwards may be more accessible. It invited the requester to submit a refined request, for example, covering a shorter, more recent period, which it might be able to process.

Even with a refined request, the UKGC cautioned that other exemptions could apply, such as those protecting law enforcement methods, which could still limit the information disclosed. For now, a complete ten-year picture of underage gambling complaints and enforcement actions remains unavailable.