Statutory RG duty / duty of care
Responsible-gambling duties on operators are usually enforced through the terms of their licence rather than a general negligence duty to individual players. In Great Britain there is no free-standing statutory or common-law 'duty of care' tort, but the Gambling Commission's Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice (LCCP) impose binding social-responsibility obligations. Some jurisdictions, notably Sweden, do write an explicit 'duty of care' (omsorgsplikt) into their gambling statute. In practice these are regulatory duties, breach of which triggers licence action rather than automatic compensation to the customer.
Great Britain: English courts have held gambling operators owe no general common-law or statutory duty of care to prevent a customer's losses (Gibson v TSE Malta LP, trading as Betfair; High Court, upheld by the Court of Appeal in December 2025).
The binding UK obligations instead come from the LCCP Social Responsibility Code, especially customer-interaction provisions (SR Code 3.4.1 for premises and 3.4.3 for remote operators), structured around 'identify, act, evaluate'.
LCCP breaches are enforced by the Gambling Commission (fines, licence conditions, revocation); non-compliance does not by itself give the customer a private right to compensation.
A narrow exception exists where an operator voluntarily assumes responsibility, for example by promising to add a customer to a self-exclusion scheme and then failing to do so.
Sweden imposes an explicit statutory 'duty of care' (omsorgsplikt) in Chapter 14 of the Gambling Act (Spellag 2018:1138): licensees must counteract excessive gambling and help players reduce it.
Since 1 October 2023 the Swedish regulator (Spelinspektionen) can set mandatory requirements for the content of each licensee's duty-of-care action plan.
Common thread across jurisdictions: operators must proactively monitor for markers of harm, interact with at-risk customers, and keep records, rather than wait for a customer to ask for help.
UK operators must build customer-interaction systems that identify markers of harm, take proportionate action, and evidence what they did (and did not do) to the Commission. Swedish licensees must maintain and follow a documented duty-of-care action plan that the regulator can prescribe and audit. Across regulated markets the trend is toward enforceable, evidenced obligations, even though a customer generally cannot sue an operator directly for a gambling loss.
Reference, not advice. A teaching summary of the regulation — confirm current requirements against the primary regulator.