The owner of Ladbrokes, Coral and the BetMGM joint venture is cutting customer care staff weeks after reporting a profitable half-year. Entain began a consultation on 16 September that could remove 400 jobs — one in five of its 2,000 customer care roles — the Guardian reported. The company had disclosed £479m of underlying operating profit for the six months to the end of June: 2% below the same period a year earlier, but ahead of what investors expected.
The company’s stated reasons were a “challenging operating environment” and higher UK taxes. Chief executive Stella David said the changes were meant to keep the business “competitive, financially resilient, and well positioned for the future,” adding that the decision “has not been made lightly.”
None of that is a company in retreat from the gambling business. It is a company moving costs out of a function that does not generate bets, at a moment when its tax bill is the live argument.
The tax fight the cuts sit inside
The UK raised duty on online casinos in Rachel Reeves’s budget last year. It did not touch the duty on physical slot machines in adult gaming centres (AGCs) — the 24-hour venues that have spread across high streets, and that the Guardian’s own reporting has found are concentrated in economically deprived areas.
Chancellor John Healey is reportedly weighing a rise in machine games duty in his first budget on 28 October, aimed at betting shops and AGCs. Research from the Social Market Foundation cited in the article estimates that doubling the duty on “category B” £2-a-spin machines could raise £275m to £458m more, on top of roughly £600m those machines already pay.
Entain has been arguing against it in public. David wrote to Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham last week claiming that doubling the standard rate from 20% to 40% would add around £100m to the cost of running its UK retail estate, and could lead to 1,470 betting shop closures and 15,900 job losses. Those are the company’s numbers, offered to make the case against the tax, and they arrive in a specific political setting: Burnham has backed a Gordon Brown proposal to fund the end of the two-child benefit cap by taxing the gambling industry more.
So the same company is, in the same month, telling a mayor that a tax increase would destroy thousands of jobs, and telling its staff that a few hundred are going now, against a half-year profit of £479m and before any duty change has been legislated.
What the article does not establish
The Guardian does not say which jobs inside customer care are affected. At a betting operator, that function includes routine account and payment queries, and it is also where deposit limits, account restrictions and safer-gambling contacts get handled; whether any of those roles are in scope is not reported, and the closure of the positions should not be read as a reduction in harm-reduction staffing without evidence.
The plant-closure arithmetic has the same status. 1,470 shops and 15,900 jobs are Entain’s projections, not an independent assessment, and they are the kind of figure that has been contested every time the industry has used it.
The market has already marked the bet down
Entain will drop out of the FTSE 100 into the FTSE 250 on 21 September. Its shares are down about 36% this year, and slipped another 1% in early trading on the day the job cuts were announced. A company employing more than 28,000 people worldwide, with brands from Gala and Foxy Bingo to BetCity and Eurobet, is being repriced as a retail-heavy bookmaker with a tax risk it cannot lobby away indefinitely.
The BetMGM stake is why this matters outside the UK. The same operator participates in the American market through that venture, and the argument it is making to British ministers — that higher taxes on machine gambling cost jobs and close shops — is a version of the argument operators make in US states weighing tax rates and revenue dependency. The difference in the UK is that the tax in question falls on the machines that take the most money from the poorest postcodes, and the company making the jobs claim has just booked a profit and started cutting staff anyway.