Key Takeaways
UK Gambling Commission posts £65,000 senior “Head of Illegal Markets” role to combat £16.6bn black market.Acting CEO Sarah Gardner welcomed £26m new government funding over three years for tackling illegal gambling.Tim Miller logged 741 cease-and-desists and 1,134 site takedowns in 2025-26.
£65,000 Salary Draws Scrutiny as Regulator Confronts £16.6bn Market
The UK Gambling Commission posted a new senior “Head of Illegal Markets” role this week, advertising the position at a £65,000 base salary that industry observers have widely criticized as inadequate for the scope. Speaking at the Bingo Association AGM on May 7, acting chief executive Sarah Gardner welcomed £26 million in new government funding over the next three years, saying this would allow the regulator to address land-based illegal gambling “arguably for the first time in a serious way.”
The scale of the problem has expanded rapidly. Research from H2 Gambling Capital, cited by the Betting and Gaming Council, found the unlicensed UK gambling market reached £16.6 billion in 2025, up from around £5 billion in 2019. Separate WARC analysis covered by Bitcoin.com last month projected that unlicensed operators will exceed £1 billion in UK advertising spend by 2028, with illegal sites already accounting for roughly 42 percent of the country’s £1.9 billion in 2026 gambling ad spend.
The Commission’s enforcement output has been substantial, even before the new role and funding take effect. In remarks at the Ethical Gambling Forum on April 28, executive director Tim Miller said that during 2025-26 the regulator had issued 741 cease-and-desist notices, reported almost 400,000 URLs to search engines, referred over 1,000 websites for delisting, and disrupted 1,134 additional sites through takedown or geo-blocking. Miller said the Commission would “continue to ramp up our action against the illegal market” while calling on Meta, Google, and Visa for a coordinated response.
The hire arrives during a leadership transition at the regulator. Andrew Rhodes stepped down as chief executive on April 30 after announcing his departure earlier in the year; Gardner has moved up from deputy chief executive to acting CEO while the board recruits a permanent replacement. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport launched a dedicated illegal gambling task force in January, led by gambling minister Baroness Twycross, designed to coordinate enforcement across regulators, law enforcement, and major platforms.
The new enforcement focus runs in parallel with the Commission’s separate work on bringing cryptocurrencies into the UK’s regulated gambling framework. At the BGC Annual General Meeting in February, Miller said the Commission’s Industry Forum had been tasked with examining how crypto assets could be used to fund legal gambling under the FCA’s incoming regulatory regime, which is expected to come into force on October 25, 2027. The framework would require any operator providing crypto-funded gambling to be authorized by the FCA at that point.
Industry voices have been less measured on the salary attached to the new role. The £65,000 base for overseeing the response to a £16.6 billion problem has been widely flagged in trade press and on industry Linkedin as out of step with the scope. Whether the recruitment yields a senior hire capable of working alongside Gardner’s acting leadership (and the £26 million in new funding) will be one early test of the Commission’s stated intent to address illegal gambling at scale.
