Sarah Gardner has spent nearly 17 years with the Gambling Commission, taking on various roles that have allowed her to engage deeply with the challenges of the gambling sector. In a recent interview, she shared, "From a regulatory standpoint, it’s a really interesting sector because you're really trying to strike the right balance between enabling people to enjoy what they enjoy doing in their leisure time, while making sure there are protections for those that need it. It's why I've never left. I've done most of the jobs actually around the senior table at the Commission."
Currently, Gardner serves as the interim CEO of the Gambling Commission, a position she stepped into following Andrew Rhodes' departure in February. This year has seen significant changes in the Commission’s leadership, including the announcement from Tim Miller, director of policy, of his intentions to leave in June. At iGB Live in July, he reminisced about his decade of service, while Sarah Fox, a senior civil servant from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), is set to take over a portion of his responsibilities in September.
Despite these shifts, Gardner humorously refers to herself as a "Gambling Commission lifer," explaining, "The Commission's proved quite difficult to leave. There is always a new challenge. Someone once described it to me as gambling regulation is utterly seductive. And I'm not sure I get that far, but it certainly keeps you really interested."
Gardner aims to encourage more creativity within the Commission, steering away from overly harsh regulatory measures.
Her tenure, however, has not been without its difficulties, particularly following sector and political reactions to updates from the Gambling Act 2005 review and the white paper. “Regulation can be a pretty thankless task because you can never please all the people. I can’t think of any announcement I’ve ever made where I haven’t had one half of the debate saying: ‘oh that doesn’t go far enough’ and the other half saying: ‘oh, it might go too far’. That can actually be a bit of an indicator that you’re broadly in the right place,” she noted.
The Commission's policy on affordability checks, known as financial risk assessments (FRAs), has been particularly divisive. In 2025, a pilot program identified high-spending players at several major operators for additional credit checks through independent agencies. This year, the Commission postponed its update on the policy but confirmed in July that it would proceed with a phased implementation, a move that received backlash from multiple industry stakeholders, including horse racing entities and politicians.
Gardner explained, “What we’re currently doing on financial risk assessments, controversial though that it is, is a really good example of striking a balance [between player enjoyment and consumer protection] because that is about finding a more sophisticated way than currently exists to hone in on the consumers who actually need the support. So you don’t have to ask a much larger sample of consumers for [additional] documents, which strikes me as frankly too intrusive for what’s meant to be a leisure activity.”
