Allwyn UK, the company that runs the National Lottery under a licence that lasts until 2034, has appointed Phil Walker — until recently William Hill’s UK and Ireland boss — as its interim chief executive. Two MPs have written to the Gambling Commission saying they are “deeply concerned” about the choice, citing a personal sanction the regulator imposed on him in 2024 and his paid boardroom role at one of Britain’s largest chains of 24-hour slot machine venues.
The letter, from Labour’s Dawn Butler and the Conservative Iain Duncan Smith, asks two narrow questions: whether Walker’s work for City Gaming Ltd, which owns the Game Nation chain, is “compatible” with running the Lottery, and “what consideration, if any, was given to this history when assessing his suitability for his present position.” The regulator’s answer was that it does not comment publicly on an operator’s personnel decisions. Allwyn’s position, reported by the Guardian, is that Walker did not lose his personal licence over the sanction, which it treats as the regulator having judged him fit and proper for the sector.
What the sanction was for
In 2024 the Gambling Commission imposed a personal sanction on Walker over “widespread and alarming” failures to enforce money laundering and terrorist financing controls at William Hill. The company itself was fined a record £19.2m the previous year for the same failures. A personal sanction is the regulator’s tool for attaching consequences to an executive rather than only to the firm, and this appointment is a test of what it actually costs the person who receives one. Here, the answer appears to be a few years of career delay and no loss of licence.
The other role
The second strand of the MPs’ letter is the directorship. Game Nation is the third-largest adult gaming centre chain in the UK — high street rooms dominated by slot machines, open 24 hours in most cases, and described by the Guardian as “slot farms.” Companies House filings indicate Walker is likely to have earned more than £50,000 from the non-executive role, a position that typically requires attendance at a small number of board meetings a year.
Game Nation said Walker would step back from the directorship from 1 September for the duration of the interim contract. That is a suspension of the arrangement, not a resolution of the question the MPs raised: whether a person earning from the slot-machine sector is the right steward of a licence worth £6.5bn over ten years, whose proceeds are mandated to fund good causes and which is played regularly by about 20 million people.
The political context makes the timing sharper. Andy Burnham, while mayor of Greater Manchester, accused the adult gaming centre sector of “targeting some of the most vulnerable in our communities,” and this month announced plans to tighten the permissive licensing regime that let the sector grow. Walker’s previous statements about “developing and growing” that business put him on the other side of that policy.
Who bears the cost
The Lottery is regulated separately from the rest of the gambling sector, and that separation is the argument for treating a gambling executive’s record as transferable to it. But the two markets share a customer base and, at the margin, a wallet. The case against the appointment is not that Walker is uniquely unfit. It is that the sanction meant to mark the most serious compliance failure at a major operator left the executive free to move to an adjacent, government-backed franchise, with the regulator declining to explain its reasoning. Jackie Olden, a campaigner whose terminally ill mother lost thousands of pounds to an adult gaming centre operator, put the objection in the terms the people affected use: “It’s awful that someone heavily involved with 24-hour slot farms that destroy families and communities can run the country’s biggest public sector contract.”
One detail from an unrelated employment tribunal, reported in the same piece, says something about the sector’s economics. In a case brought by a former Game Nation employee, a witness statement described a customer paying a homeless man to defecate in a shop toilet so the staff member would have to clear it up. The company was ordered to pay £6,598.44, on a technicality in its dismissal procedure rather than over the incident. Against £32m of revenue last year, the Guardian notes, it made that money back in under two hours.