‘Will we ever be done with billionaires crying?’

Betfred founder Fred Done said in a recent Financial Times interview that he would “not wish to be reborn” in the UK. His reasons were primarily due to tax increases, in particular a potential rise in duty for some slot machines in the upcoming budget.  

The Social Market Foundation has recommended an increase in Machine Games Duty from 20% to 40%. The IPPR in and Gordon Brown have also backed this increase, a move which could raise up to £458 million for the Treasury.

For the year to March 2026, the high jackpot “B3” slot machines extracted more than £2.4 billion from high street gamblers in bookies, adult gaming centres, and bingo premises. Their spin speed of every 2.5 seconds at £2 a stake means large amounts can be lost quickly. These machines should only ever have been permitted in real casinos. 

Bookies and slots venues are concentrated in areas of high deprivation, and recent research has found links between the density of gambling premises and crime. The anonymous cash-in and ticket-out machines have been shown to facilitate money laundering and hamper the recovery of crime proceeds. 

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Gambling is also a low Gross Value Added (GVA) sector in the economy, and despite the gross profits of gambling increasing, its GVA is declining. Its GVA in 2024 was 32 per cent lower in real terms than in 2010. Moreover, multiple studies show that funds spent on gambling are detrimental to the economy, with funds spent on other services generating more in tax, while causing less harm. 

In 2025, Mr. Done claimed all Betfred shops would close if taxes rose to even 35%. Remote Gaming Duty was set at 40% in the following budget, but only 10% of Betfred shops closed. Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury Select Committee, said at the time that the obvious “scaremongering” had failed. Fred now claims that by 2030 there will be no betting shops and the high street will be dead. Don’t believe this latest round of scaremongering either.  

The historical context matters. The Labour 2005 Gambling Act allowed online gambling to be operated from offshore, avoiding UK taxes, without any gambling tax. The Tories corrected this with a “point of consumption” tax in 2014, but Betfred had, by then, enjoyed many years of tax-free growth. The betting shop machines, first known as Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), only had their maximum stake reduced from £100 to £2 in April 2019 after years of campaigning. 

A four machines-per-betting-shop limit resulted in too many shops, as bookies tried to maximise slots profits. Today there are more betting shops than bank branches. Since 2020, there has been a 27% decrease in the number of betting shops, but the total gross profit is the same, meaning the gross profit per shop has increased by over 37%.

Torsten Bell MP recently shone a light on another crying billionaire, the Manchester United co-owner, Brexiteer, and tax-exiled Monaco resident Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who claims the UK is “on the slide”. Bell said Ratcliffe “hates his own country while complaining he doesn’t get big enough subsidies from it.”

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Manchester United has just signed a £20 million training kit deal with Betway, a Malta-registered online gambling company, arguably to circumvent gambling sponsorship rules on match kits. New research shows that restricting gambling marketing is a game of whack-a-mole, where operators will simply relocate their resources, just as Betway has done, rather than retreat.

This all adds credibility to the recent House of Lords report recommending a “comprehensive ban on gambling advertising”, a move supported by the more than 60 organisations, including 21 councils, making up the Coalition to End Gambling Ads. Anything less than a near complete ban risks allowing it to pop up elsewhere.

Neoliberalism and offshoring created a paradise for a few billionaires. We are fortunate enough to have in Andy Burnham, a Prime Minister who understands we should aim to restrict those acting contrary to the wider socio-economic interest. His plan to scrap the “aim to permit” principle that has delivered more than 200,000 slots on high streets since the 2005 Gambling Act is the right move.

The addictive design of slot games was so effective it was imitated by social media companies. Hook the user, hold their attention, harvest their data, and hide the harm was the Meta playbook, as exposed in Californian litigation, and it’s still effectively used by gambling companies. The inevitable consequence of all that is, of course, harm. Restraint of social media is now a cross-party aim. There is no good reason for gambling to be treated differently.

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