On Thursday 18 June 2020, the Dutch House of Representatives discussed the Remote Gambling Decree (one of the two major pieces of secondary legislation) in a plenary debate with Minister Sander Dekker of Safety and Justice. Ten motions were filed. In the debate, Members of Parliament (MPs)  introduced motions, and the Minister provided his comments and advice relating to those motions. On Tuesday 23 June 2020, the House of Representatives voted on the motions.

Formally, the envisaged date of entry into force of the Remote Gambling Act (RGA) is still 1 January 2021, with the remote gambling market opening on 1 July 2021. However, the main take-away of the debate, and the motions introduced therein, is that the Minister stated that a further delay cannot be excluded. Such delay however would not be more than ‘a couple of months’. With a motion requesting for researching the possibilities for delay now adopted, there is a real possibility that a further delay will occur. Such delay has however not yet been confirmed.

Other notable motions that were adopted are:

• extension of the cooling-off period in step with a possible delay of the entry into force date/market opening date. This was expected;
• reconsideration of the customer identification requirements for land based operators. This was rather unexpected and might be positive for land based operators who are faced with mandatory customer registration under the draft secondary legislation; and
• involvement of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in the development of policy in the field of gambling addiction and prevention in the next term of government.

Luckily, the motion to slash back the licence term from five years (the term currently included in the draft legislation) to three years has been rejected. A detailed summary of every motion and the voting outcome is included at the bottom of this update. We do note that the actual effects of the adopted motions will only become visible at a later stage, when concrete steps of implementing the motions are taken. We will post regular updates in this regard.

CRUKS

On another note, the KSA published the technical specifications for CRUKS (the Central Exclusion Register) on Monday 22 June 2020. For now, the KSA focuses on informing land based operators only. In July, a test-environment will be made available, where land based operators will be able to test their ability to connect with the CRUKS database.

Remote gambling operators will be able to take part in the aforementioned activities in the future, but are already able to take note of the technical requirements for CRUKS. For more information, see the KSA information page (in Dutch) here.

Please contact us if you have any questions on these recent developments.