Camelot plans legal challenge to National Lottery licence decision

Camelot is reportedly planning to go to the High Court to challenge the result of the Gambling Commission’s National Lottery licence tender.

UK.- Perhaps unexpectedly, the UK’s incumbent National Lottery operator Camelot looks set to mount a legal challenge to the Gambling Commission’s choice of the Czech Republic’s Allwyn as its preferred applicant to run the lottery from 2024. Camelot is reportedly planning to take the matter to the High Court.

The Gambling Commission announced two weeks ago that it had chosen Allwyn as its preferred bidder for the fourth National Lottery licence. The Czech lottery giant saw off bids from Camelot, Sisal and Northern & Shell and would be the first operator other than Camelot to run the lottery since its inception in 1994.

However, Camelot immediately announced that it was “considering its options” and the Daily Telegraph has now reported that the company is claiming that the Gambling Commission “broke the law” by changing the rules of the tender after Camelot initially came first in a scoring system used to assess each operator’s bid.

The Telegraph says Camelot is claiming that the Gambling Commission removed a 15 per cent risk factor weighting that was originally used in its assessment of the bids. The company also claims the regulator failed to scrutinise Allwyn’s claims about how much money it will give to good causes.

The company reportedly plans to lodge a case against the Gambling Commission in court this week. Camelot has done this before. When it initially lost the first National Lottery licence re-tender in 2000 to Richard Branson’s Virgin, it took the matter to court claiming unfair treatment and won, eventually retaining the licence, which it has held ever since.

The Gambling Commission has described the National Lottery tender process as “fair, open and robust”. Last week, the regulator fined Camelot £3.15m for a series of National Lottery app failures dating back several years.