BETTER CHANGE
What are you trying to explain yourself for?
Like so many of us, Better Change’s Engagement Director, Rob Mabbett, isn’t quite ready to say goodbye to the summer just yet. Over to you Rob…
good few weeks yet before I need to dig out the rain jackets and pullovers ready for Autumn. The summer period creates a unique fl ux in our industry in some areas such as sports betting especially this year without a major football tournament (I am not counting the club world cup!) things can slow down but for others particularly if you have a venue in a tourist hotspot, things can really ramp up.
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In our world our work certainly shifts towards the internal to do list in terms of improving products and services as opposed to the external focus of networking with clients or speaking at industry events. The whole outreach operation does not completely stop of course but we have to be mindful of holidays, childcare and other priorities in the summer months. This of course is the same for politicians and indeed world leaders, they are human after all (well at least most of them anyway) which tends to lead to a quieter political landscape. Traditionally this
20 SEPTEMBER 2025
es, as I write, the school term is about to start and without doubt the nights are starting to draw in, but I reckon I have a
provides an opportunity for smaller political movements and topics which never quite make it to the front pages to become headline news. For those of you who have followed the review of the gambling act in the UK, you will have noticed that progress over the past fi ve years came in shifts and starts, this was often due to other items on the agenda taking precedence and when you look at those items, Brexit, War in Europe, Covid, a fi nancial crisis and of course countless elections, you can understand why. But when gambling does hit the headlines, something is always startlingly clear. Not only is the narrative negative, (that’s the case for the majority of news items sadly because let’s face it good news just doesn’t sell!) but it always amazes me how little comprehension or acknowledgement there is of the progress that the regulated market has made in terms of protecting its customers.
Some gambling commentators of course simply do not want to acknowledge this work, theirs is a mission to discredit, restrict, block and ban gambling regardless of any consideration of
the work of the professionals in the industry. Often based on an emotional motivation born out of a personal experience it is understandable why they don’t want to engage with the industry they see as a cause for something negative in their lives. What is unacceptable however, is when politicians and policy makers infl uenced by these emotional campaigners do not themselves look at the evidence from both sides. This is particularly damaging when those parties also use these cases as emotional leverage. This, along with the assumption that the public’s default negative stance on gambling, means whatever statistics or proposals that are put forward are likely to be blindly accepted as long as the outcome is a negative one for the industry. Two cases during “slow news” periods during the summer which spring to mind are the proposed tax hikes on land-based gambling in the UK and the recent publication of research looking at the impact of safer gambling messages. In the fi rst case a former UK prime minister weighed in with the argument that higher
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