Twilight of the bookies as gambling companies turn their backs on the high street
On a half-mile stretch of high road that runs from Stratford, in east London, toward Leytonstone, eight betting shops are situated within minutes’ walking distance of each other.
It is a sight that has become common across Britain over the past 20 years, and one that has frequently been used to exemplify the decline of the high street. Yet, while the proliferation of betting shops in spots like this across Britain may suggest a booming industry to the naked eye, bricks and mortar bookies are in decline.
The number of high street bookmakers in Britain has plunged by around 30pc in the past five years, according to figures from the Local Data Company.
Almost 2,400 have shut their doors for good during this period. The scale of this decline makes bookies the second fastest disappearing business from British high streets, behind bank branches.
That is not to say that Britons have gone cold on gambling. Excluding lotteries, the gross yield of the industry in Britain (the amount companies took home after deducting players’ winnings) rose by 9.3pc to £10.9bn in 2023, according to the Gambling Commission. What has changed is their presence on the high street.
Major brands including William Hill and Ladbrokes closed hundreds of sites during the pandemic. Closures have slowed since lockdown restrictions eased, but numbers are still falling faster than they were in 2018, data show. A combination of tighter regulations, soaring costs since the pandemic and a struggle to attract younger gamblers to the high street have been blamed for the decline in numbers, as well as, crucially, a broader shift towards online gambling.
“People used to go to the high street bookie and put a bet on, now you just do it on your sofa,” says one industry source. “There’s no justification for having a massive nationwide chain.”
Betting shop revenues at William Hill’s owner, 888 Holdings, fell 7pc over the first three months of 2024, which it said was because of a 2pc reduction in shop numbers, while Entain, the owner of Ladbrokes and Coral, posted a 6pc drop in betting shop sales over the same period. “This is a business that, if you’ve managed to keep your revenues as they were the year before, that’s a success,” says Andrew Tottenham, a gambling industry consultant.
Perhaps the biggest factor, though, is that regulations brought in to clamp down on what was until 2019 gambling shops’ most profitable asset – fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) – have simply made swathes unprofitable. FOBTs allowed customers to stake as much as £100 on the outcome of various games such as roulette. They were limited to four per shop, but by opening a cluster of shops in one area, companies could get around this.
“It was a ridiculous thing,” says Tottenham. “If you were allowed four machines, suddenly everybody was complaining because there were a lot of bookmakers on the high street. If you said, ‘well, you can have 25 machines’, you would see less bookmakers.”
However, as the prevalence of the machines grew, the sheer speed at which customers could lose money and questions around their addictive nature made them the target of calls for a clampdown. New rules were brought in, capping FOBT stakes at £2 shortly after amid warnings of mass closures from bookmakers.
As well as the clampdown on FOBTs, bookies have faced the same soaring costs for utilities and rising wage bills as other retail and hospitality businesses since the pandemic.
At the same time, betting shops face the challenge of how to appeal to younger customers who are used to doing everything on their phones. “There’s a general trend, which is that the high street customer is getting older,” says Tottenham. “As people die, they are not being replenished, the younger ones are not coming into the market. [Betting shops] have evolved to look after a certain age group – it’s not very exciting for younger people.”
There has also been a significant shift towards online gambling over the past decade, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, making opening physical stores a less appealing prospect for operators. “Players who wanted to place their bet on what sports were on and wanted to play some casino games did migrate online during that period,” says Vaughan Lewis, chief strategy
Shift to online betting makes physical stores a less appealing prospect,
‘There’s a general trend, which is that the high street customer is getting older’
officer at 888. However, he insists many customers have now returned to in-person betting and that there is still a place on the high street for bookies.
“There’s a really large, consistent loyal base of players who enjoy going to betting shops, whether it’s for the social aspect, whether [they] prefer to use cash, whether it’s just for killing time and something to do.
“In terms of how popular they are, how much they are used and the overall spend per shop, it’s very similar to where it was, pre-Covid and pre-FOBT changes.”
While Britain is still a lucrative market for gambling companies, other parts of the world are now proving more alluring to executives. These include the US, which has been undergoing an explosion in demand for sports betting since a Supreme Court decision in 2018 allowed states to set their own gambling rules, and Brazil, where gambling restrictions have been loosened.
“I personally think that the UK is one of the toughest markets, because of its maturity and the presence of some of the giants with very distinctive names that customers just know,” says Vlad Kaltenieks, chief executive of Irish bookmaker Boylesports, which has mounted an expansion in the UK over recent years.
As well as competition from other bookies, betting shop owners are increasingly facing the prospect of competing with so-called adult gaming centres, offering a vast array of slot machines.
“With the demise of the bookmaker, there’s been more demand for these other machines,” says Tottenham. “So, naturally, where do people who are used to playing these machines go?”
A spokesman for the Betting and Gaming Council said: “Betting shops support around 42,000 jobs on the UK’s hard-pressed high streets, contribute £800m a year in tax to the Treasury and another £60m in business rates to local councils.”