There is a danger of inadvertently offering facilities for gambling — raffles are effectively a lottery as your customers are required to pay to participate and the prizes are allocated based on who is lucky enough to have bought the winning ticket. In order to run a lottery, an operating licence from the Gambling Commission is required.
However, you can breathe a sigh of relief if you are looking to provide some fun for your customers; you can run your raffle as a customer lottery as long as you ensure that no profits are generated.
Customer lotteries are exempt from the requirement to hold any type of gambling authorisation, if certain conditions are satisfied.
Providing unauthorised facilities for gambling is a criminal offence and could lead to a review of your premises licence. Here are our top tips for ensuring that you don’t gamble it all away:
- The raffle must be organised and run by you rather than an external promoter;
- The tickets must only be sold to customers while they are at your pub premises;
- You must ensure that you do not make any profit from the raffle. All proceeds must be spent on prizes and reasonable expenses, such as the cost of buying books of raffle tickets;
- The raffle can only be advertised at your premises. This can include posters outside the premises, but you are not permitted to distribute promotional material;
- Customers participating in the raffle must be given a ticket that states the name and address of your premises, the price of the ticket, confirmation that tickets are only available to customers of the premises and the fact that the ticket is non-transferable;
- Children under 16 years of age must not be allowed to take part in your raffle;
- The price for each ticket must be the same and you must ensure that your customers have paid for the tickets before you issue them;
- Prizes can include cash, goods (such as vouchers, DVDs or chocolates) or any mixture of the two. However, the value of the prize must not exceed £50;
- There cannot be any rollover of the prizes; and
- There must be at least a seven-day gap between draws.
The requirements of running a raffle are more in depth than they first appear — don’t leave them to chance. This may not be high on your list of due diligence priorities, but following the tips above will ensure that your premises are not the subject of enforcement action.