Paddy Power Will Close Up to 100 Shops, a Fifth of Its Estate

Flutter has put a number on the retail review it declined to quantify in August. Up to 100 of 506 shops go before the end of the year, with about 400 jobs at risk, and the company names the Budget.

• Flutter Entertainment will close up to 100 Paddy Power betting shops in the UK and Ireland before the end of the year, around a fifth of an estate that currently stands at 506 offices
• About 400 jobs are at risk, with the company saying affected staff will be offered redeployment where possible and consulted throughout
• Flutter cites rising energy costs, rents and business rates alongside the higher gambling taxes announced in the Budget
• It follows 57 Paddy Power closures last October, so the estate would fall from 608 to roughly 406 within a year, and comes after Betfred's 132 closures and 270 shops shut by William Hill's owner Evoke
• The announcement lands on the same day Entain was confirmed out of the FTSE 100 on the same fiscal arithmetic

The Number Flutter Would Not Give in August Has Arrived

Flutter Entertainment confirmed on 3 September that it will close up to 100 Paddy Power betting shops across the UK and Ireland before the end of the year. The estate stands at 506 offices, so the reduction is roughly a fifth of it. About 400 roles are at risk, and the company says affected employees will be offered redeployment where possible and consulted closely through the process.

The framing has moved. When Flutter flagged a review of its retail estate alongside its second-quarter results in August, it attached no number, no timetable and no brand, and said detail would follow at third-quarter results in November. It has now given the number three months early. The company points to rising energy costs, rents and business rates as well as the higher gambling duties announced in the Budget.

This is the second cut in under a year. Paddy Power closed 57 of 608 shops last October, when Flutter said explicitly that those closures were not directly linked to tax and warned that any duty rise would have a significant impact on jobs and investment. On the current trajectory the estate falls from 608 to roughly 406 inside twelve months.

It is also not an outlier. Betfred announced 132 closures over the summer and blamed the Budget, prompting the Treasury to note within days that duty rates for betting premises had not changed. Evoke, which owns William Hill, has shut 270 shops. Remote Gaming Duty is set to double from 21% to 40% from April.

Flutter Has Changed Its Story on Tax, and That Is the News

In October the company said its closures were not directly related to potential tax rises. Today it lists Budget tax rises among the causes. Nothing about a betting shop's profitability changed in the interval except the announced duty schedule and the general cost base, so the shift is either a more honest account than the first one or a more useful one. Both readings matter. If retail closures were always partly fiscal, the industry's October messaging understated the effect a Chancellor has on high-street employment. If they were not and now are, then the pass-through from an online duty rise to land-based jobs is faster and broader than the Treasury's revenue modelling assumes, because Remote Gaming Duty is not a tax on shops at all. Either way, a company that was careful to separate the two last year has stopped doing so.

Greg Knight Told Us the Industry Was Chasing the Wrong Villain

Two weeks ago this publication published an interview with Greg Knight, chief executive of Jenningsbet and a member of the Betting and Gaming Council's executive committee, in which he argued precisely the opposite of what Flutter is now saying. Knight's case was that media rights, not tax, will decide which shops survive: a typical shop's live-racing content and data bill has risen from about £40,000 a year five years ago to roughly £70,000 now, a cost that climbs on its own schedule regardless of what the Chancellor does. "If a shop makes money, it makes money," he told us, adding that retail tax rises close retail units, not online ones. He is worth listening to because he is the operator still opening shops while the corporates close them. Today's announcement does not refute him, and in one respect supports him: Remote Gaming Duty is an online tax, so a company citing Budget duties as a reason to shut betting offices is making the connection Knight says does not hold. The honest position is that nobody outside these companies can see which line item actually broke the unit economics, because none of them publish shop-level costs.

A Fifth of an Estate Is a Different Decision From a Trim

Closing 57 shops out of 608 is estate management. Closing up to 100 out of 506 is a change of view about whether the format has a future at this scale. The distinction shows up in what happens to the survivors: a smaller network carries the same fixed content and data costs across fewer units, which is the mechanism Knight describes as a doom loop, where each closure lifts the per-shop bill and tips the next marginal shop over. Flutter has more capacity to absorb that than an independent does, and it has 400 people to redeploy or lose in the meantime. What nobody has yet produced is the number the whole argument turns on, which is what a British betting shop actually costs to run and which line is growing fastest. Until an operator publishes that, the tax-versus-media-rights dispute is two credible accounts and no evidence.

Flutter has given a figure and named a cause. The cause is contested by the one chief executive still betting on the high street.