Tim Miller, the UK Gambling Commission’s departing executive director of research and policy, has left the industry with a parting shot: some of the biggest names in legal gaming are playing both sides of the fence.

Speaking at iGB Live last month, Miller didn’t pull punches. He flagged that licensed operators and suppliers present at the event maintain connections to the unlicensed market. It’s a pointed reminder that the boundary between regulated and black market operators isn’t nearly as clear cut as the industry would like to believe.

The Blurred Middle Ground

Miller’s core concern centres on a fundamental misconception. The industry talks about licensed and illegal gaming as though they’re separate ecosystems. They’re not. Companies operate in the grey space between them. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes through negligence in their supply chains.

This isn’t new territory for Miller. Over a decade at the UKGC, he’s been consistent in his criticism of major tech platforms for failing to adequately police illegal gambling operators. His message has always been the same: either support the legal market or don’t.

“You cannot be using suppliers and affiliates that are also supporting the illegal market,” Miller told delegates. Straightforward logic, but apparently difficult for some to implement.

Pressure on the Sector

Miller’s exit comes at a challenging moment for UK gaming. The Gambling Act white paper and recent Autumn Budget changes have tightened the screws on operators. Rising taxes and shifting regulations have made the landscape less competitive, while illegal operators run without these cost burdens.

The British Betting and Gaming Council has already pushed back against proposals to double machine games duty, warning the policy would further squeeze legal operators and hand market share to unlicensed rivals. That’s the practical consequence of the blurred lines Miller was highlighting.

What’s Next

Miller will continue his regulatory career elsewhere, taking his 10 years of institutional knowledge beyond the UK gaming sector. Whether his successor will maintain the same pressure on industry standards around black market connections? We’ll see.

His departure underscores a real tension that won’t disappear: the legal industry wants fewer regulations and lower taxes, but that only works if the playing field stays genuinely level. Right now, the UKGC’s view is that it isn’t.

What the team thinks

Carl Mitchell says:

Miller’s hitting on something real here, but I’d add that the problem runs deeper than just operator connections to unlicensed sites, it’s about the grey market operators who’ve found ways to operate in legal jurisdictions without proper licensing. What we’re seeing is a sophistication arms race where the best compliance teams can spot these dodgy links, but smaller operators and suppliers often lack the resources or know-how to audit their own supply chains properly. If the UKGC wants to tighten this up, they need to stop treating it as a moral failing and start treating it as a due diligence framework issue, because most legitimate operators I’ve spoken to actually want to clean house, they just need clearer guidance on what “maintaining connections” actually means in practice.