The self-appointed Gambling Policy Commission

Something called the Gambling Policy Commission suddenly appeared this week, with the announcement that it will be launching "an independent review of UK gambling laws and regulations". 

NEW: A group of leading economists and experts has today launched an independent review of UK gambling laws and regulations, alongside an open call for evidence. The Gambling Policy Commission comes over 20 years after the publication of the Budd Report and the introduction of the 2005 Gambling Act. It is comprised of former advisers to the Bank of England, HM Treasury, the Independent Football Regulator and the Social Mobility Commission. Read more: https://t.co/aFkADHlv48

— Gambling Policy Commission (@gampolcom) November 9, 2026

 

A Commission is usually an official group convened by government, such as a Royal Commission. This one has nothing to do with the government, so what is it and who is it "independent" from?

 

A look at its website provides the least surprising answer imaginable...

 

Seed funding for the Gambling Policy Commission has been philanthropically provided by Derek Webb. 

What more needs to be said? Derek Webb has been behind so many anti-gambling groups in the UK since 2013 that it is hard to keep up. He has founded and/or funded the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, Stop the FOBTs, Clean Up Gambling, the Coalition to End Gambling Ads and an anti-gambling All-Party Parliamentary Groups which keeps changing its name, as well as funding various left-wing think tanks (and, indeed, the Labour Party). Their demands get more and more extreme. There is no reason to think that the Gambling Policy Commission will take a more balanced view of the issue than any of his other front groups. 

 

Members of the Commission have been drawn from a range of backgrounds, including economics, law, public policy, health, academia and sport. They are: Philippe Auclair, Professor Chris Bojke, Peter Kellner CBE, Professor Lindsey Macmillan, Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, Dr James Noyes, Professor Janet O’Sullivan and Thomas Savill.

The group is chaired by Jagjit Chadha OBE, professor of economics at the University of Cambridge. James Reade, professor of economics at the University of Reading, is serving as the Commission’s chief economist.

 

Not all of these names are familiar to me but some are. Dr (of theology) James Noyes led the charge for affordability checks and gambling duty increases. Peter Kellner used to be on the board of Action on Smoking and Health. Janet O'Sullivan is a trustee of the neo-prohibitionist pressure group Gambling With Lives, which has just got £5 million from the gambling levy. Jagjit Chadha was the director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research when it produced a piss-poor estimate of the cost of gambling harms in 2023.

Chadha, Savil and Noyes are all directors of the similarly named Gambling Policy Committee, a limited company set up in March to manage the money which, by the look of it, will all be coming from the ubiquitous Mr Webb.

The Guardian's racing correspondent Greg Wood has written about the GPC, treating it as a quasi-official organisation and not mentioning Webb's involvement. He urges the racing industry to participate in it. This strikes me as bad advice. The anti-gambling lobby cannot be appeased or bargained with. No one can stop Webb from having his little show trial but consumers and the industry should be wary of giving it legitimacy and credibility by participating. It will not have any bearing on the GPC's conclusions, which inevitably be to ban, ban and ban. It will just allow them to say that consumers and industry were heard during the process.

In 2017, the parliamentary commissioner for standards rebuked the APPG on FOBTs for trying to pass off a self-published report as an official House of Commons publication. The bookmakers were invited to take part in that charade but wisely refused, describing it as a "kangaroo court". A cordon sanitaire around Webb's latest venture would also be sensible.

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