There are 1,637 gambling companies on the UK register. 176 are in trouble
A count of every gambling, betting, casino and lottery company registered in Britain finds 118 facing strike off, 51 in liquidation and a further seven in administration or receivership.
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There are 1,637 companies on the UK register whose declared activity is gambling, betting, casinos, lotteries or gaming machines. Of those, 176 are no longer in good standing.
The count comes from the Companies House free company data product, the monthly publication of the whole register, filtered to the standard industrial classifications covering the sector.
Key points
- 1,637 gambling and betting companies are registered in the UK.
- 1,461 of them, 89 per cent, are active and in good standing.
- 118 are active but facing a proposal to strike off.
- 51 are in liquidation, four in administration and three in receivership or with a receiver appointed.
The distressed tail
The largest group in difficulty is not those in formal insolvency but the 118 companies listed as active with a proposal to strike off. That status usually follows a failure to file, and it ends in the company being dissolved unless somebody objects or brings the filings up to date.
Behind that sit 51 companies in liquidation, four in administration, two in receivership and one described as live but with a receiver manager appointed over at least one charge.
Taken together that is 176 companies, or roughly one in nine of the sector.
Where they are registered
London accounts for 286 registered offices, more than the next five locations combined. Birmingham follows with 43, then Cardiff on 32, Glasgow on 31, Edinburgh on 30 and Warrington on 29.
That distribution should be read carefully. A registered office is an address for service, frequently an accountant or a company formation agent, and a single address can serve dozens of companies that trade nowhere near it. It is a map of where operators incorporate rather than of where the industry does business.
A small sector by number
For scale, the whole UK register holds more than five and a half million companies. At 1,637, gambling and betting is fewer than one in three thousand of them.
That is worth holding in mind against the industry’s public profile. The sector is large in revenue, in regulatory attention and in political argument, and small in the number of corporate entities that make it up.
What happens next
The register is republished monthly and this count will be refreshed with it. Companies House does not verify the information filed with it, so the classifications above are what each company reported about itself.