Key takeaways
- The UK Gambling Commission appoints a £65,000 ‘illegal markets manager’ role to tackle the £16.6bn black market.
- Acting CEO Sarah Gardner has welcomed new government funding of £26m over three years to tackle illegal gambling.
- Tim Miller recorded 741 ceases and desists and 1,134 site removals in 2025-2026.
£65,000 salary attracts scrutiny as regulator faces £16.6bn market
The UK Gambling Commission this week advertised a new role for “illegal markets manager”, advertising the role with a base salary of £65,000 which industry observers have widely criticized as being inadequate for its scope. Speaking at the Bingo Association’s AGM on May 7, interim chief executive Sarah Gardner welcomed £26m of new government funding over the next three years, saying it would enable the regulator to tackle illegal land-based gambling “arguably for the first time in a serious way”.
The scale of the problem quickly expanded. A study by H2 Gambling Capital, cited by the Betting and Gaming Council, found that the UK unlicensed gambling market grew to £16.6 billion in 2025, up from around £5 billion in 2019. A separate WARC analysis covered by Bitcoin.com last month predicted that unlicensed operators would surpass £1 billion in advertising spend in the UK by 2028, with illegal sites already accounting for around 42%. of the country’s £1.9 billion in 2026. spend.
The Commission’s enforcement results have been substantial, even before the new role and funding came into effect. In a speech at the Ethical Gaming Forum on April 28, executive director Tim Miller said that during the 2025-2026 period, the regulator had issued 741 banning notices, flagged nearly 400,000 URLs to search engines, referred more than 1,000 websites for delisting, and disrupted an additional 1,134 sites through removal or geo-blocking. Miller said the Commission would “continue to intensify our action against the illegal market” while calling on Meta, Google and Visa for a coordinated response.
The hiring comes during a management transition within the regulator. Andrew Rhodes resigned as chief executive on April 30 after announcing his departure earlier in the year; Gardner moved from assistant general manager to interim general manager while the board recruits a permanent replacement. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport launched a dedicated illegal gaming taskforce in January, led by Games Minister Baroness Twycross, designed to coordinate enforcement between regulators, law enforcement and major platforms.
The new enforcement priority parallels the Commission’s separate work to integrate cryptocurrencies into the UK’s regulated gambling framework. At the BGC’s annual general meeting in February, Miller said the Commission’s industry forum had been tasked with examining how crypto assets could be used to fund legal gaming under the FCA’s new regulatory regime, which is due to come into force on October 25, 2027. The framework would require any operator providing crypto-funded gaming to be authorized by the FCA at that stage.
Industry voices have been less measured on the salary attached to the new role. The £65,000 base to oversee the response to a £16.6 billion problem has been widely reported in the trade press and on Linkedin as being out of step with the scope of the project. Whether the recruitment will result in a senior recruit capable of working alongside Gardner’s interim leadership (and the £26m of new funding) will provide an early test of the Commission’s stated intention to tackle large-scale illegal gambling.
