Gambling Commission CEO Andrew Rhodes has said the regulator has been encouraged by the reaction to the pilot of its operator working group.

The initiative is just one introduced by the UK regulator to improve collaboration and cooperation with operators.

The Commission “started small,” Rhodes said in his briefing last week, with a cohort of eight operators in February. They were provided with a dedicated phone number and email address for any queries, be they technical or for general advice and support.

This has since been scaled up to 500 operators by the end of October – 22 per cent of the UK licence base.

“With the end of the pilot, we are now going to take some time to review if this service is the solution that best serves the needs of licensees and is achievable on a permanent basis at the same time,” Rhodes said.

“But I think it’s fair to say the reaction from operators involved – including many of you in the room today, has been encouraging.”

Rhodes said the UKGC had resolved all 295 queries by the end of October, with two days the average response time.

Ninety-three per cent of queries were resolved within five days, and there was 95 per cent positive engagement on the regulator’s survey results.

“Building on that, 95 per cent of respondents have said that they are likely or very likely to use the service again if they had another query,” Rhodes said.

“This has been backed up by positive feedback direct from those who have used the service. At the Commission we’ve been speaking about how we want a better, more constructive relationship with all of you for some time.

“The relationship management approach we’ve developed with you this last year is our latest effort to embed that constructive way of working at every level of our work.”

The illegal market was also on Rhodes’ speech agenda, as he urged operators to ramp up due diligence on their supplier.

“I said to you last year that I wanted to encourage you to use your commercial influence with any partner or supplier you have to ensure they were taking all the relevant steps to verify they were not supporting illegal activity facing into Great Britain,” the CEO said.

“I’m going to go one step further than that today and strongly suggest you all undertake due diligence to ensure none of your suppliers are directly or indirectly engaged in supporting unlicensed activity in this market.

“The Commission’s strategy on combatting illegal gambling is to cause as much up-stream disruption as we can, which is why we have focussed on ISPs, payment providers, search engines, software suppliers and more.”

The regulator will “in the very near future” also ask operators for data on account restrictions and the reasons.

“We want to understand what the actual reality is for accounts being factored, restricted, closed, put onto zero stakes and other similar things,” Rhodes said.

“We cannot continue to be surrounded by a debate where it is not clear what the true picture is.”