The High Court has dismissed a negligence claim against the operator of the Betfair exchange. Mr Justice Swift held that a gambling company owes only a narrow duty to prevent foreseeable severe gambling disorder, and that the Gambling Commission’s code is not the measure of that duty in tort.
The approved judgment in [Ashton v TSE Malta LP [2026] EWHC 2935 (KB)](https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/ann-marie-ashton-and-others-v-tse-malta-lp/) was handed down remotely at 2pm on 13 November 2026 and released to the National Archives. The defendant, TSE Malta LP, operates the Betfair betting exchange. The claim was brought by Ann-Marie Ashton, on behalf of the estate of her husband, Luke Ashton, who died by suicide on 22 April 2021, aged 40; by their young son, through his mother as litigation friend; and by a third claimant, India Rose Panczel. It was a claim in negligence under the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1934 and the Fatal Accidents Act 1976.
The judgment is a public court decision on a point of law. This account follows the judge’s findings and does not revisit the family’s private circumstances beyond what is needed to understand the result. Support details are at the end of the article.
The claim the court had to decide
Mr Ashton had gambled online since 2009 and held accounts with a number of companies. The particular focus of the claim was his betting in June to July 2019 and in the first four months of 2021. The claimants’ case, as finally put, was that the defendant should have identified a customer whose gambling showed indicators of impending harm to health, and should have taken preventative action in line with paragraph 3.4.1 of the Commission’s social responsibility code and its customer-interaction guidance.
One premise of the claim was that Mr Ashton suffered from gambling disorder, a psychiatric condition recognised in the DSM-5 manual, and that the defendant’s alleged failures made that condition worse. The claimants relied, by analogy, on the employer stress cases, particularly Hatton v Sutherland.
TSE Malta denied that the broad duty contended for existed, and denied that Mr Ashton had been shown to have the disorder.
Why the Commission’s code was not treated as the law of tort
Swift J started from Calvert v William Hill Credit Ltd [2008] EWHC 454 (Ch), in which Briggs J rejected a wide duty to offer assistance to any customer showing signs of problem gambling. The judge found the duty now contended for to be, in substance, the same kind of broad duty.
He placed weight on section 24(8) of the Gambling Act 2005, which provides that failure to comply with a Commission code of practice “shall not of itself make a person liable to … civil proceedings.” That subsection is not, he said, a complete bar to every civil claim. It is significant. To adopt the Commission’s regulatory standards as the measure of a tortious duty would tend to “usurp the position and role of the statutory regulator,” and would be an inappropriate development of the common law.
Three further reasons led him to the same conclusion. First, the code’s reach is much wider than recognised psychiatric injury: licence holders are told to identify customers who are or may be “experiencing harms associated with gambling,” a phrase that is not limited to illness. Second, the guidance is open-textured. Operators must “take into account” the guidance, but it is not a set of hard-edged rules that can serve as a predictable yardstick in a damages claim. Third, questions such as how affordability should be checked involve social-policy judgements that the Commission and the government have still been developing, including after the 2023 White Paper and a later pilot. Those, the judge said, are not a sensible guide to the scope of tortious liability.
A customer, unlike an employee, has no obligation to gamble. Holding a record of transactions does not, in the judge’s view, create a relationship equivalent to employment. Personal autonomy, including the freedom to act unwisely, therefore carries particular weight.
The narrow duty the court did accept
The court did not hold that gambling companies owe no duty at all. Following the reasoning in Hatton, Swift J accepted that some duty should exist, but that it should be tightly constrained. The duty, he held, is “no more than a duty to act to prevent gambling disorder in its severe form when that form of the disorder is foreseeable.”
Foreseeability turns on the operator’s knowledge, and must be applied realistically. Possession of data collected as a record of a customer’s betting “cannot be equated with foreseeability of psychiatric injury,” because a diagnosis depends on more than patterns in a ledger. A closer relationship might change what the operator ought to know. The judge referred, as an example, to Gibson v TSE Malta (t/a Betfair) [2024] EWHC 2900 (Comm), which involved a VIP customer whose account was managed by a specialist team in regular contact with him.
In practice, a risk of severe gambling disorder will be “plain enough” where the company is on notice of a diagnosis of gambling disorder in any of its forms, mild, moderate or severe, or where, in the language used in Calvert, the customer’s behaviour “has become so extreme as to demonstrate … that his gambling is wholly outside his control.” In those circumstances, the action required would be to cease providing gambling services to that customer.
The judge distinguished that narrow duty from other kinds of claim, such as a failure to honour a self-exclusion request, which might now be framed in contract. He also drew a line between the common law and the regulatory scheme, which places obligations on operators from the first bet and is aimed at a wider idea of gambling-related harm. That scheme remains a matter for the Commission. It is not, on this judgment, the standard of care in a psychiatric-injury claim.
Why the evidence was not enough
On the facts, the claim failed before breach or causation arose. Mr Ashton was never diagnosed with gambling disorder during his life, and his medical records did not assist. The claimants’ psychiatric expert, Dr Barker, concluded after the death that eight of the nine DSM-5 criteria were met. The defendant’s expert, Dr Needham-Bennett, said a diagnosis could not safely be made from betting records, because the criteria depend largely on subjective information.
Swift J preferred the defendant’s expert. He found the evidence insufficient to show that Mr Ashton had suffered from gambling disorder. If a conclusion on the point was required, he added, it was that Mr Ashton did not suffer from any form of the disorder within the DSM-5 definition. It followed that there was no basis on which the defendant knew, or ought to have known, that he had the condition. The duty of care on which the claim depended did not arise. The court therefore did not decide breach, causation or contributory fault, and dismissed the claim.
The coroner’s report, and a Commission review
The judgment records that the Commission reviewed the events leading to Mr Ashton’s death so far as they concerned gambling regulation, and in November 2021 decided that no action was required. After the inquest, the coroner issued a Prevention of Future Deaths report, stating a concern that the defendant’s player-protection tools had been inadequate. The Commission responded that it intended to consider matters further in the light of the coroner’s findings.
Swift J said it was appropriate for the Commission to consider those circumstances and its social-responsibility provisions. He did not treat the coroner’s report, or the Commission’s earlier decision, as deciding the negligence claim, and he did not make a finding of regulatory breach. The two systems, regulation and tort, remain distinct on this judgment.
That distinction will matter for other families, and for operators, as the UK continues to tighten its rulebook. The statutory reforms are described in our updated guide to the 2025-26 gambling changes. Public funding for harm prevention is a separate track, set out in our report on the £39.7 million OHID programme. Disputes with the Commission also continue in the courts, including the claim by two former Entain executives. What Ashton decides is narrower, and important: a betting operator’s civil duty to prevent psychiatric injury is not a copy of the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice.
Gambling in Great Britain is for adults aged 18 and over. If you are affected by suicide or are in distress, you can contact Samaritans for free, day or night, on 116 123, or visit samaritans.org. Free and confidential support with gambling is available from the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133 in England and Scotland, or 0808 2819 265 in Wales, and from BeGambleAware. This article is news reporting, not an advertisement. Under Spain’s Royal Decree 958/2020, only operators licensed by the DGOJ may advertise gambling to Spanish residents.
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