Cats Blessing

What is Cats Blessing?

To all of those I met at the handful of conferences I attended before Covid-19 sent everything to digital, and all of those I met over email or Zoom since, it was a pleasure to meet you. I hope we get the chance to meet again when all of this is over, and you can reach me at any of my contact details listed at the bottom if you want to catch up in the meantime.

I’m still not 100% sure what I’ll be doing next, but I suspect it will still be in the gambling industry. This has been my life for more than a decade, and it’s an industry I continue to love and appreciate. No matter if I continue to write about it or throw myself back into an operations setting, it will always be apart of who I am. If you still want to be in touch, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can follow me on Twitter if you to know whatever tangent I’ve gone off on next.

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What is Cats Blessing?

The reforms, announced at the end of August, introduced a package of what it referred to as “evidence-based” legislation. 

As well as a statewide exclusion register, the package also set out to reduce the number of poker machines from the current figure of 87,000 across 2,100 clubs and hotels. 

The government said it aims to achieve this by increasing the forfeiture rate when gaming machine entitlements are traded from one in three to one in two. 

How to play Cats Blessing

In an interview with the Financial Times over the weekend, Done cautioned that additional tax hikes could result in widespread betting shop closures, harm related sectors such as horse racing and accelerate the decline of the high street.

Betfred currently operates approximately 1,094 retail shops across the UK. Done highlighted the concrete risks of Machine Gaming Duty – taxes on gambling machines – doubling from 20% to 40%, a move reportedly under consideration by Chancellor John Healey ahead of the Autumn Budget.

Betfred’s retail business still heavily depends on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) and in-shop gambling. Despite the maximum stake limit being cut to £2 in 2019, FOBTs account for roughly half of Betfred’s shop profits. Done emphasised that without these machines, retail betting wass “impossible”.