Match-fixing in the UK is becoming harder to police, with senior DCMS officials telling the House of Lords that criminals are moving into lower-tier sports and newer prediction platforms that make enforcement more opaque. The warning came as peers examined the Macolin Convention, the Council of Europe treaty on protecting competitions, which the government submitted to Parliament for ratification in June.
The strongest numerical signal came from the Sports Betting Intelligence Unit, where reports indicated a 28% rise in incidents between 2024 and 2025. Football and tennis led that increase, reflecting the huge financial flows those sports generate globally.
The Gambling Commission says its Sports Betting Intelligence Unit handles reports of betting-related corruption, gathers intelligence on potentially corrupt activity and works with the betting industry, sport governing bodies and the police. Its background material says UK betting integrity has seen a significant rise in awareness and reporting in recent years, especially in higher-profile sports, but that evidence of corrupt betting has mainly been limited to discrete, opportunistic cases rather than systematic corruption.
That broader picture did not sound reassuring to the officials giving evidence. Emma Floyd, the DCMS director of sports and betting, said the landscape poses a “very serious threat to the integrity of sport, public trust, and fair competition”, as well as to the regulated betting market.
Floyd also argued that the convention itself was designed to keep pace with new products. She said it was written in a “technology-neutral” way so that modern prediction products would be captured by it.
Lord Johnson of Lainston said oversight becomes even more opaque as alternative prediction platforms grow, making conventional tracking difficult. Floyd replied that blocking websites alone does not solve the problem, and that authorities must also find ways to disrupt customer acquisition, advertising and payments.
The evidence before peers also underscored the collaborative machinery behind Britain’s betting-integrity system. The Commission says it set up the Sports Betting Integrity Panel in 2009, the Sports Betting Intelligence Unit followed from that work, and the Sports Betting Integrity Forum was established in 2012 to coordinate the sport, betting and law-enforcement response. The UK has signed the Macolin Convention, and the SBIU and SBIF are described as Britain’s national platform for managing betting integrity in line with that framework.
The ratification process has been slow. The article said pandemic disruption, Brexit and legal disputes over Malta’s licensing model accounted for an eight-year delay, and that after the legal process resumed, the committee expected to complete its official report by autumn.
The funding question also surfaced in the Lords. Lord Boateng questioned whether the public should bear the cost of oversight and argued that licensed operators should contribute more, saying the industry should pay for the system that polices it.
