Gambling hit by budget but not online gambling

It is not often that a budget in the UK warrants comment from an online gambling portal such as gambling.ie but there seems to be so much in the news about what it all means to online gambling companies and what effect if any that might have on the horse racing industry. The first piece of the budget news that does not affect Irish gambling directly is the increase in tax on the controversial fixed odds betting machines which are found in bookmakers in the UK. These gambling machines have been subject to a special tax of 20% anyway since February 2013 but now the tax is to be increased to 25% which according to William Hill for example would have wiped £22 million off last year’s results. Anyone who does their gambling online of course has no access to these gambling machines and in Ireland they are not present so whether there are accurate figures or not is a question especially as everybody has previously been told that the online gambling sector is increasing year on year and as has been pointed out before, online casinos also provide the chance to gamble large amounts in a short period of time so the probable issue is that with a 20% tax FOBTs cannot possibly provide proper odds suggesting that they do not use a random number generator as is the case in online casinos. However, this is only part of the problem as the UK Government reaffirmed the intention to apply a 15% online gambling tax for those companies whose online operations are based overseas which is all of them. The same argument has been had in Irish gambling circles for some time but nothing has so far come of it. The only good part for non online gambling was the tax rate reduction for bingo halls from 20% to 10% but whether this will attract gamblers back is doubtful as the smoking ban still remains.