Dutch legislators going through the motions on gambling reform

The Dutch House of Representatives has adopted a series of motions around gambling over the past two weeks, including calling for more research into the gambling age limit.

In the latest round of votes this week, the House approved an amended motion submitted by MPs Rosemarijn Dral and Marieke Wijen-Nas, respective members of the People’s Party and the Farmer–Citizen Movement.

The motion calls for the State Secretary for Legal Protection, Teun Struycken, to properly investigate whether or not raising the age limit for playing ‘risky games of chance’ from 18 years to 21 years would benefit the black market.

In February, Struycken announced a series of proposed reforms to the Gambling Act (KOA Act), which re-regulated the Dutch online gambling market in 2021. This included the proposal of increasing the age limit for certain casino products.

The reforms have been broadly welcomed by stakeholders amid rising public and political concerns about gambling visibility in the Netherlands since the market re-launch in 2021.

However, as with other countries like the UK, some stakeholders and policymakers are concerned that further restrictions could drive customers towards unlicensed operators.

In their statement, Dral and Wijen-Nas called on Struycken to “conduct this research for this reason and to share the results with the House in good time before the plenary debate on the amended Koa Act”.

It is important to note that parliamentary motions in the Netherlands are, for the most part, a call to action on the government from legislators, and are not indicative of concrete changes in law or policy.

Motions are a good way of gauging the opinions of the House on certain topics though, and Dral and Wijen-Nan’s motion on 15 April was approved by 131 out of the House’s 150 members from 15 political parties.

Malta makes its way into Dutch motions

Only one other motion heard this week was adopted with four others being rejected. The one to see the light of the government’s day was proposed by Michiel van Nispen of the Socialist Party, with support from four other MPs.

The motion calls on the government to “ensure a stricter duty of care as soon as possible and give serious weight to the proposals of the Gaming Authority and addiction experts”. The MPs end goal is to see a stronger framework for problem gambling prevention.

Given that Struycken and the government have initiated the review of the 2021 Gambling Act with the primary purpose of finding ways to strengthen player protection, it is likely that the MPs will get their wish in some form.

Additionally, their comments about the need for the opinions of the Gaming Authority, the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), to be heard seem to have already been addressed by the government, according to the regulator itself.

The KSA stated earlier this year that it expects to gain more powers to enforce player protection and counteract the black market as part of Struycken’s wider package of reform.

Meanwhile, the three motions rejected included a call for the government to intervene when industry self-regulation falls short and a call to ensure that physical casinos are present in ‘equal number’ to the online alternative.

The fourth rejected motion had much wider implications and was much more indepth, including references to Malta’s Bill 55 – a controversial piece of legislation adopted by the island nation which tries to prevent companies based and licensed there from being penalised or enforced against by overseas courts.

As many companies licensed with the Malta Gambling Authority (MGA) are active internationally, this has caused a bit of a stir, with Germany’s regulator, the GGL, particularly opposed.

In the third rejected motion this week, some Dutch legislators called on the government to make it mandatory for Netherlands licence holders to be established within the country.

MPs also called for Amsterdam to “make every effort to tackle, bilaterally and at European level, and if necessary with unilateral sanctions, EU member states that facilitate providers in avoiding their legal liability”.

This is essentially a direct challenge to Bill 55, which MPs cited as an example of an EU member state facilitating unlicensed and/or non-complaint behaviour by operators. This is not the first time the Bill has been criticised in the Netherlands, having been condemned as threatening the market’s integrity back in 2023.

Although the motion was rejected marginally by 80 votes to 70, this does show that more and more policymakers across Europe are becoming frustrated with Bill 55 and its implications.