Phil Walker, former UK and Ireland boss of William Hill, is set to take over as interim CEO of Allwyn UK on 7 September, replacing Andria Vidler.
His appointment has not passed without controversy, with Labour MP Dawn Butler and Conservative Iain Duncan Smith writing to the Gambling Commission expressing “deep concern” about his suitability for the role.
The concern centres less on Walker’s career in gambling and more on specific episodes within that career that have drawn significant regulatory and political attention.
During his tenure at William Hill, the Gambling Commission imposed a personal sanction on Walker in 2024 following what it described as “widespread and alarming” failures around anti-money laundering and terrorist financing controls.
William Hill had already been hit with a record £19.2m fine in connection with those same failings, making the regulatory history particularly difficult for Allwyn to sidestep.
Walker also serves as a non-executive director at Game Nation, an adult gaming centre operator whose 24-hour, slot-heavy venues have attracted growing political scrutiny in recent months.
That creates an uncomfortable dynamic, given that Walker has previously spoken about helping Game Nation “develop and grow” while the government simultaneously promises a clampdown on adult gaming centre licensing.
Allwyn has defended the appointment, pointing to Walker’s operational, digital and marketing experience and noting that he retained his personal licence following the Gambling Commission sanction.
Walker will step back from his Game Nation role during his time at Allwyn, but questions from MPs show no sign of quieting down ahead of his September start date.
Running the National Lottery, with its unique public role and billions earmarked for good causes, evidently carries expectations that stretch well beyond regulatory minimum standards.
Elsewhere in the industry, Gordon Brown has re-entered the gambling tax debate, this time calling for a major increase in Machine Games Duty, arguing it could raise up to £500m to help households deal with rising energy bills.
Brown also suggested that current Prime Minister Andy Burnham would be inclined to pursue a similar approach, adding a layer of political weight to the proposal.
The racing sector sees the proposal very differently, warning that higher MGD could reduce betting shop viability, trigger closures, and ultimately cut into racing levy and media-rights income.
The Betting and Gaming Council estimates that doubling the tax rate on category B machines could result in more than 2,900 betting-shop closures and over 21,000 job losses across the sector.
The BHA has warned that the impact on racing finances could be “significant,” echoing concerns raised during last year’s budget discussions when similar tax hike proposals were put forward.
Brown made comparable recommendations ahead of that budget, calling for Remote Gaming Duty and MGD to rise to 50%, though the government ultimately raised RGD to 40% and left MGD untouched.
Regulus Partners’ Dan Waugh has characterised this latest intervention as a rerun, observing that last year gambling taxes were framed around child poverty and this year the hook is pensioners facing higher energy bills.
The BGC argues that another tax raid could accelerate the decline of the regulated sector and drive customers toward the black market, a warning it has consistently repeated throughout recent budget cycles.
On a lighter note, a Financial Times piece this week explored why humans are fundamentally poor at generating genuinely random sequences, a finding with real relevance for the gambling industry.
Mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis found that a coin has a slight tendency to finish the same way it started, undermining one of gambling’s most enduring assumptions about pure chance.
The article also revisited the 1980 Pennsylvania Pick 3 scandal, in which lottery staff weighted balls with latex paint to make certain numbers more likely to appear, and a more recent case where an IT expert at the Multi-State Lottery Association inserted a software backdoor to predict lottery numbers on specific dates.
Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, built a machine in the 1950s capable of predicting which of two levers a human would choose, guessing correctly 65% of the time by exploiting predictable human behaviour.
For an industry built on the premise of randomness, these findings serve as a useful reminder that true unpredictability is harder to achieve, and easier to undermine, than most people assume.
