Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
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.
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.