Two MPs have written to the Gambling Commission to object to the appointment of Phil Walker as interim Chief Executive Officer of Allwyn UK, the company that operates the National Lottery, citing his four years in senior roles at William Hill.
Iain Duncan Smith and Dawn Butler, both long-running campaigners for tighter gambling regulation, said they were “deeply concerned” about the appointment. Their letter was seen by The Guardian and reported on 26 August.
Allwyn UK announced Walker’s appointment on 19 August. He replaces Andria Vidler, who ran the business through the handover of the National Lottery licence from Camelot in February 2024. Allwyn described Vidler’s exit as a mutual decision with the group board.
“With the major transition milestones delivered, now is the right time to look to the future and build on the solid foundations that have been laid,” said Justin King, Chair of Allwyn UK.
The William Hill settlement
Walker held senior executive roles at William Hill for more than four years, including UK and Ireland Managing Director. In March 2023, the William Hill group paid £19.2m to the Gambling Commission to settle social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures across three of its licensed businesses.
That figure is still the largest regulatory settlement in the Commission’s history. The investigation found a series of know your customer (KYC) and customer interaction failures, and Andrew Rhodes, then Chief Executive of the Commission, said the regulator had given “serious consideration to licence suspension”.
Walker was Chief Commercial Officer at 888 Holdings, now evoke, between 2023 and 2024. 888 agreed to buy William Hill’s non-US business in 2021 and completed the deal in 2022. He has also been Chief Operating Officer of the Gibraltar Stock Exchange.
The adult gaming centre link
Walker is also a Non-Executive Director of City Gaming, which owns adult gaming centre (AGC) operator Game Nation. His LinkedIn profile lists the role as running until the beginning of September.
That connection places him in a retail segment the government is currently moving against. On 11 August, Prime Minister Andy Burnham set out plans to scrap the aim to permit rule, the Gambling Act 2005 provision that requires licensing authorities to approve applications that meet the licensing objectives. Removing it would give councils the power to block new betting shops and AGCs on the high street.
For Duncan Smith and Butler, the overlap between a National Lottery chief executive and a company operating in that segment is part of the objection.
What the appointment looks like from Allwyn’s side
The National Lottery is a licensed gambling product, and the pool of executives who have run large UK retail and online gambling businesses is small. Walker’s William Hill years cover exactly the commercial and retail experience Allwyn UK needs from a caretaker chief executive, and William Hill is one of the oldest and largest retail betting brands in the country.
Penalties are also common across the operators that pool would be drawn from. Entain paid £17.2m in 2022 over similar social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures, a year before the William Hill settlement. A candidate with no exposure to a Commission enforcement case would be a rare find at that level of the market.
Duncan Smith and Butler have criticised gambling operators and the Commission consistently over the past several years, which makes it difficult to read the letter as a judgement on Walker alone rather than on the recruitment pool the operator drew from.
Allwyn UK is coming off a period of operational change under Vidler, including the migration of the National Lottery’s technology and retail estate and a rework of its draw games. The company reported that the new Lotto and Powerball games made 56 millionaires since launch.
Where this goes next
The Commission has not said whether it will act on the letter, and Allwyn has not commented publicly on the MPs’ objection. The regulator has no formal veto over who an operator hires, but it does assess the suitability of key personnel under the National Lottery licence, which gives the letter a route into a live process rather than a purely political one.
Walker’s role is interim, so a permanent appointment is still to come, and that search will now run with two MPs watching the outcome. The wider question is what a UK operator has to look like at board level while the government is preparing to give councils a veto over gambling premises, and whether a lottery licensee is expected to answer to a different standard than the betting operators it recruits from.
Source: Gambling Commission, The Guardian
