Gambling Commission - Test Purchase Operations Warning

The Gambling Commission has today announced that their test purchasing programme is set to continue across England and Wales during the next few months.

The Commission will work in conjunction with a group of local authorities across England and Wales to directly test the effectiveness of under-age gambling policies and procedures at arcades, betting shops, bingo clubs and casinos.

This is in addition to the regular test purchase operations undertaken by local authorities of their own volition which include gaming machines found in pubs and clubs.

The Commission has excluded from the scope of the exercise any operators that have either provided them with some assurance that they are making headway with their own monitoring of policies (e.g. by using third-party test purchasing and sharing the results with the Commission), or that are members of a trade association that has a test purchase scheme available for its members as of July 2013 and that association is encouraging its members to join the scheme.

The tests are designed to provide the Commission with evidence that licensed operators have sufficient safeguards in place to prevent under age gambling and will be conducted using under 18s under the supervision of trained officers.

The Commission expects to publish anonymous, aggregate results for each sub-sector (but will not publish individual operator-specific results) in due course.