Playing it straight at the Gambling Commission

Spring is in the air. This week is one of the racing calendar's foremost events the Cheltenham Festival. But Jenny Williams is unlikely to be putting a bet on any of the horses in Friday's big Gold Cup race. Williams is chief executive of the Gambling Commission. Her job is to regulate the UK's commercial gambling industry, under the rules of the Act passed in 2005, which changed the way gambling is regulated and replaced the former Gaming Board with the new, Birmingham-based commission. Williams has been there since the beginning of the new organisation . She is, as it were, old-school Whitehall: that is, a highly-trained professional manager. When she joined the commission, she knew very little about gambling, but says the powers that be "weren't fussed" about that. Instead, they hired Williams for her reputation as a safe pair of hands, her ability to know her way round the Whitehall network, and her independent-mindedness - hugely important in a job where it would be dangerous for the regulator to be seen to be too close to the industry. "I've had a whole variety of roles," comments Williams. That is something of an understatement. Williams was previously a director general at the Lord Chancellor's Department and before that held a range of posts as a senior civil servant in the transport and environment departments, the Home Office and the Inland Revenue. Her breadth of knowledge and her experience of the way Whitehall is run have been particularly relevant to her present job, because of the way the commission operates. The department for culture, media and sport sets the lesiglative framework and sponsors the industry, so there's an important partnership there, but so are the commission's relationships with local authorities and the police. The Gambling Commission licenses operators, while local authorities license premises. "We have hugely overlapping powers, so understanding how government works is very important," says Williams. How to work with officials "As an independent regulator, we have to be able to keep that independence without getting at loggerheads with other bodies. It's useful to know the kinds of things that would worry politicians and how to work with officials." Williams says the Commission is working closely with local authorities to explore how best to regulate gambling. "That's something we need to explore together, with real examples," she explains. "You've got some local authorities who are enthusiastic and put in more resources, while for others it's a low priority." The commission's strategy is to work with the more enthusiastic councils and then spread the message more widely. One aspect of the commission is very straightforward. "It has huge teeth," says Williams. The ability to take away suppliers' licences, and hence their livelihood, gives the commission real purchase. "But we can also be more subtle. We can fine; we can give formal warnings, which are bad for reputations. So we can do a gradated approach. But what we find and it's true worldwide, is that licences are so important that you very rarely need to get to that point. You just growl and then they will broadly speaking comply. So we have these teeth, but we don't often have to bare them." More complex is the commission's duty to protect society from the potentially harmful aspects of gambling. People can come into betting shops or casinos and lose money very quickly "People can come into betting shops or casinos and lose money very quickly," acknowledges Williams. "That's like powerful motorbike stuff. But then there is the problem gambling." Williams says the problem here is that there is a surprisingly small amount of good research on problem gambling. "We think for example it probably isn't the size of stake. It looks like much more likely to be something to do with repetition. So you may get just as sucked into problem gambling by low-stake gambling. People may, for instance, become addicted through internet gaming, which isn't gambling. We don't know yet." Williams talks regularly to equivalent regulators all round the world and says that provides a highly useful and practical network for regulating efficiently. On one thing she is clear, though: regulation of any kind needs to be proportionate and needs to ensure it is not having unintended consequences. "I try to see things in the wider context," she comments. "Why is it that people are enjoying it so much? Why is it growing? What are they getting out of it? If you start taking that away, you might do more harm than good. So that's the really tricky area."