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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what recent estimate he has made of the net annual financial benefit to British racing of extending the Horserace Betting Levy to overseas operators; and if he will make a statement.

Offshore remote betting operations have not hitherto been licensed by the Gambling Commission. This means there is currently no centrally collected and publicly available comprehensive dataset of offshore remote operator profits on which to base an estimate. This will change once the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act comes into force on 1 November. We expect the Gambling Commission will be including data from remote offshore operators in their Industry Statistics from 2015.

In the Government’s recent consultation Extending the Horserace Betting Levy, we noted that any estimates of potential additional yield extrapolated from published information such as some company accounts would necessarily be “best guesses” and could only be indicative, not least because the remote gambling market is growing very quickly. We said that the range of “best guesses” ran from £10m to £30m p.a. and sought estimates of potential additional levy yield from respondents assuming the rate of collection remained at 10.75%. Such estimates as were received in consultation responses generally fell within that bracket. The government will be publishing its response to the consultation in due course.