Published August 2026. Last reviewed August 2026.
For years, treatment for gambling harm in Britain was paid for by the gambling industry on a voluntary basis. Operators donated what they chose, to a charity that distributed it, and the organisations doing the actual work lived with the awkwardness of being funded by the businesses whose products had harmed their clients.
That arrangement has now ended. In its place is a statutory levy, set in law, collected from operators and directed by government. In principle this is a better system, and most people working in the field said so at the time. In practice, the switch from one system to the other has pushed a series of small charities to the edge, and some over it.
What the levy is
The statutory levy came into force on 1 April 2025. It is charged on gambling operators at rates between 0.1% and 1.1% of gross gambling yield, depending on the sector, and is expected to raise around £100 million a year.
Half of that money is allocated to NHS England, and to the appropriate bodies in Scotland and Wales, to commission treatment for gambling-related harm. The remainder is divided between prevention work and research.
The intention was straightforward: put treatment funding on a statutory footing, make it predictable, and sever the direct financial relationship between operators and the services treating the people their products had harmed.
What was supposed to happen
GambleAware, the charity that had distributed voluntary industry funding and commissioned the National Gambling Support Network, announced on 25 July 2025 that it would cease operations by 31 March 2026, handing its role to three new commissioners across England, Scotland and Wales.
Its chair, Andy Boucher, said at the time that the priority was “keeping people safe from gambling harm and to ensure stability and continuity for our beneficiaries as the new commissioners take over”.
NHS England formally took on commissioning responsibility for gambling harms treatment in England on 1 April 2026. Responsibility is currently expected to move again, to integrated care boards, from April 2027.
What actually happened
Operators paid the levy. Money reached government. And then it stopped moving.
The levy was collected in early September 2025. Distribution to providers had been expected that October. Trade reporting through the winter suggested providers were being told to expect January 2026 or later, with the new commissioning arrangements not yet ready to receive them. Mark Potter of IC360 put the problem plainly: “They’re not ready to launch the new providers, that leaves a large gap.”
A gap is an abstraction when you are describing a funding timetable. It is not an abstraction if you are a charity with a payroll.
Who paid for the gap
The organisations that absorbed it were, for the most part, small and specialist. Reporting earlier this year described nearly every body in the sector having experienced serious financial difficulty during the transition, with core services cut, repeated rounds of redundancies, reserves run down, and staff pulled off service delivery to spend their time fundraising instead.
Some did not make it. Alerts Group, a lived-experience organisation, has closed. Deal Me Out, which did education and awareness work in Wales, was among those affected. Others survived by spending money they had put aside for something else.
It is worth being precise about what this means, because “charity funding crisis” is a phrase that slides past the eye. The organisations under pressure were, in many cases, the ones providing intensive and residential support to people whose gambling had cost them their homes, their marriages and their liberty. Capacity of that kind takes years to build. It takes one bad quarter to lose, and it does not reappear when the money finally arrives.
There is a further irony in the sequence. The levy exists to make funding independent of the industry. During the gap, several organisations stayed alive on reserves accumulated under the old voluntary arrangements. The system designed to end the dependence was, for a period, kept afloat by its proceeds.
Where it stands now
Funding awards for 2026 to 2027 have been in preparation, and NHS England has been commissioning a mix of NHS and voluntary sector provision. But the structural picture has not settled, for a reason nobody planned for: NHS England is itself being wound into the Department of Health and Social Care. Trade coverage in May described the levy-funded programme as being in limbo as a result.
So the sequence for anyone trying to follow it is: a charity commissioned services, then NHS England commissioned services, then integrated care boards are due to commission services from 2027, while the body holding the budget in the middle of that chain is being abolished. Three commissioning models in roughly three years, for a treatment area with a few thousand people in specialist care at any one time.
What this means if you are looking for help now
Treatment for gambling harm has not stopped. NHS clinics are operating, and voluntary sector providers are still taking referrals. But two practical things follow from the upheaval.
The first is that information goes out of date faster than usual. A service listed as available in an article, a leaflet or a directory may have changed its referral route, its catchment or its funding since that page was written. Check the date on anything you read, including this page, and confirm directly with the provider before you rely on it.
The second is that where you live matters more than it should. Commissioning is being rebuilt at different speeds in England, Scotland and Wales, and within England it will shortly be devolved to integrated care boards. Provision that exists in one area may not exist in the next one.
Why we are writing about this
The Recovery Trust publishes a directory of residential treatment providers, and gambling is one of the areas our members work in. We do not deliver treatment, we do not take referrals, and we cannot advise on which service is right for anyone. What we can do is explain how the system that pays for treatment actually works, and say so plainly when it is not working well.
The levy is the right idea. Statutory, predictable funding, independent of the businesses that profit from the harm, is what the sector asked for and what it should have. But a good policy delivered through a badly sequenced transition still costs people their treatment, and the organisations that carry that cost are rarely the ones that designed the timetable.
If you need help now
In an emergency, call 999. The National Gambling Helpline is on 0808 8020 133, free and open at any hour. Samaritans are on 116 123. NHS 111 can also help you find local support.
Sources. NHS England, Gambling Harms Treatment Programme. iGaming Business, GambleAware to cease operations as statutory levy transition continues, July 2025. NEXT.io, Multiple UK gambling charities on brink of collapse amid statutory levy disarray. SBC News, Gambling harm levy in limbo as NHS England faces axe, May 2026.
This article explains funding and commissioning arrangements. It is not clinical or financial advice. If any detail here has changed, please tell us and we will correct it.
