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Gambling: Internet

Question for Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

UIN 138360, tabled on 2 February 2023

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to help protect people who exclude themselves from gambling platforms.

Answered on

21 February 2023

As a condition of their Gambling Commission licences, all operators must offer self-exclusion procedures for customers, with multi-operator self-exclusion schemes in place for both online gambling (where all operators must be integrated with the GAMSTOP scheme) and land-based sectors.

As part of the self-exclusion process, licensees must take all reasonable steps to prevent marketing materials being sent to any self-excluded individual, including removing their details from any marketing database within two days of receiving notice of self-exclusion. If a customer has registered with GAMSTOP, all operators are expected to remove them from marketing lists. Operators who fail to comply with self-exclusion requirements are subject to enforcement action from the Gambling Commission.