The UK Gambling Commission's policy direction over the last eighteen months has done two things, simultaneously, that sit somewhat awkwardly together. It has tightened the framework of consumer protection inside the UKGC perimeter — affordability checks, stake limits on online slots, deposit-limit defaults, and a redesigned account closure flow — while accepting, in successive policy statements, that none of these protections apply to UK residents who are playing on operators licensed elsewhere.
The practical consequence of this is that the gap, in 2026, between what a UK-licensed operator must do and what an MGA-, Curaçao- or Anjouan-licensed operator chooses to do has widened. From the consumer-protection perspective that's a problem. From the consumer-experience perspective — and this is where the conversation gets uncomfortable — it has, for a meaningful minority of UK players, become part of what they perceive as the relative attractiveness of offshore operators.
There is now a small but growing body of operational research, much of it published since late 2024, on the actual behaviour of UK residents on non-UKGC sites. The pattern that emerges is that the average non-UKGC user is older, more experienced, more likely to be male, and more likely to be playing higher-volatility products than the UKGC-licensed equivalent. The averages, of course, obscure a long tail of users for whom the absence of affordability checks is the operative attraction, and that long tail includes people whom the UKGC framework was designed to protect.
The Commission's December 2025 statement of strategy is interesting because it acknowledges this directly. It commits to an evidence-gathering programme on cross-border consumer flow, to closer cooperation with EU and Crown-Dependency regulators on advertising rules, and to a sharper line on UK-licensed brands using offshore-licensed sister sites to reach UK customers. What it does not do, because it cannot, is extend UK consumer protections to operators it does not license.
For Scottish players specifically — and this is a UK-wide policy area, but Scottish players make up around 8% of UK online gambling spend and an estimated 11–13% of declared non-UKGC spend — the practical decision points haven't changed fundamentally. If you are inside GamStop, then GamStop applies inside the UKGC frame and not outside it; that has been the case since GamStop launched, and it has not changed in 2026. If you are looking at affordability friction inside UKGC sites and considering offshore alternatives, the choice you are making is about which set of protections you keep and which you give up.
Our reader forum maintains an ongoing, plain-language thread on this — this month's editor-picked discussion of non-GamStop sites is here — which we point to here not as an endorsement but as one of the more straightforward writeups of what is actually different between the two regulatory frames.
What we do not see, in any of the consumer-research base or in the regulatory data, is a case for the proposition that offshore equals dangerous and UKGC equals safe. Both frames protect against some things and not others. The honest version of the answer in 2026 is that the question 'which is safer' has become 'safer in which respect'. That is the conversation the policy literature has caught up to.
Iain Crawford is Senior Reporter at The Scottish Review.