Gambling - Bingo in Pubs - The final chapter?

Following our earlier updates regarding the matter of Greene King –v- Gambling Commission.

A copy of the approved Judgment is now available on the BAILII database and can be read here.  The Court of Appeal Judgement makes interesting reading for those interested in the scope of the Commission’s discretion.  In a detailed judgement recounting the history and legal framework for decisions concerning the granting of an Operating licence.

Although Greene King  (the Applicant) were deemed to be a suitable and competent Applicant the Commission’s discretion extended beyond the issue of suitability of the Applicant when considering the potential impact upon the Licensing Objectives.  In this case the Regulatory Panel of the Commission first ruled in March 2014 “that the it would be harmful to the statutory licensing objectives to provide gambling in pubs as proposed.” This is despite the Applicant’s good standing.

Lord Justice Hickinbottom rejects on a number of occasions arguments which suggest the Commission’s discretion in limited to the Operating licence including at paragraph 50 of his judgement:

Looking at the context more broadly, it is, to say the least, a bold proposition to suggest that, in determining an application for an operating licence, given its statutory obligations in relation to pursuit of the licensing objectives and its wide discretion, the Commission has neither the obligation nor even the power to consider whether the proposed operating model is reasonably consistent with the licensing objectives. The construction which Ms Fitzgerald (Counsel for the Applicant) presses would mean that the Commission would be required to grant an operating licence in respect of an operating model for gambling which, as in this case, it considered inconsistent with the pursuit of the licensing objectives.

The Court of Appeal’s judgment clarifies that the Gambling Commission has wide discretion when exercising its functions and can consider the operating environment in which gambling facilities take place as part of its assessment of whether an application is consistent with the licensing objectives.

This case will now be returned to the First-tier Tribunal.