DCMS Announces Three-Month Gambling Levy Transition Fund Until July

The UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) will make grant funding available to organisations during a transitional period for organisations moving to funding from the statutory levy from the previous voluntary funding system.

The organisations receiving the Gambling Levy Transition Fund are those delivering the prevention or treatment of gambling harm. Funding from the DCMS will cover a period of three months, starting on April 1, to cover the gap created during the period of transition.

Statutory levy recap

The statutory levy came into effect last April, as one of the terms from the 2023 Gambling White Paper, requiring all licensed operators to pay a percentage of their gross gambling yield to contribute towards efforts to treat and prevent gambling harm.

The rate ranges from 0.1% to 1.1%, dependent on the specific gambling-related activity. In December, the DCMS said the levy had raised close to £120 million so far.

This marked a shift from the previous system of a voluntary levy, where operators would make an annual financial contribution to regulator the Gambling Commission, which would be distributed to one or more organisations which delivered or supported research.

The distribution of the funding is broken down into three areas. A total of 50% of the funds will go towards treatment and support services, 30% will fund prevention or treatment of gambling harm, managed by the Office for Health and Disparities (OHID), and the remaining 20% of funds will go to UK Research and Innovation.

Criteria must be met

To be eligible for the three-month transitional grant funding, organisations must meet a number of criteria. They must have been using funding from the industry-funded voluntary system between April 1, 2024 and March 31, 2026 and must have been delivering relevant activity in March 2026 in support of service users and/or beneficiary groups in England who may be affected by the period of transition.

Applications for the transitional funding must also have bid for funding from the levy via the Gambling Harms Prevention VCSE [Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise] Grant Fund and/or the Gambling Harms Treatment VCSE Grant Fund and had their application entirely rejected. Applicants must be charities, or charitable, benevolent, or philanthropic in purpose.

The transitional funding will cover staffing and related costs for the continuation of delivery. The funding provided will total no more than an equivalent pro rata value of three months funding from the current voluntary system.

For example, if a company has received £120,000 of voluntary system funding to support 12 months of provision, the DCMS will provide no more than £30,000 to support three months of provision.

GLEN unhappy with short notice

The Gambling Lived Experience Network (GLEN) recently criticised the process of distributing prevention funding generated by the levy, after interested parties were given just 13 days’ notice of their funding before it was due to start being used.

GLEN wrote in a LinkedIn post:

“We truly hope that all organisations in this space received at least the equivalent funding to what their previous costs were because any other situation is not a transition which protects existing support to build a better system, but a lottery where services are sacrificed without any assessment or evaluation of needs they currently address. “13 days’ notice of whether you have a future or not is hardly fair on the VCSE sector (especially when local authorities have known their funding allocation for some time).”