The billionaire Done family took a £30m dividend from their Betfred gambling empire, before warning that they would close hundreds of bookies and cut jobs if the government increases tax on high-street slot machines.
The chancellor, John Healey, is understood to be considering proposals to double machine games duty in the upcoming budget, a move that the Social Market Foundation thinktank has said could boost state coffers by up to £460m.
Industry figures, led by the Betfred boss, Fred Done, argue that such a move would result in the closure of vast swathes of the bookmaking and casino sector.
On Wednesday, Done was among industry signatories who signed a last-ditch letter to Healey, warning that the policy could trigger up to 1,470 betting shop closures, 34 casino closures and 15,900 job losses.
The plea, first reported by Sky News, came as Betfred’s holding company filed its accounts at Companies House.
The Warrington-based betting firm won a record £996m from British punters in the year to the end of March 2026, the accounts show, booking a pre-tax profit of £64m.
The strong performance allowed Betfred to pay its shareholders – mainly a series of trusts benefiting the Done family – an interim dividend of £30m, taking the value of shareholder payouts to more than £105m since 2022.
The money is understood to have been reinvested into other Done family businesses, including their burgeoning property empire.
Last month, Fred Done, who founded his first bookies in 1967 and went on to become one of Britain’s richest men, lamented that he “would not wish to be reborn” in the UK.
“They keep saying those with the broadest shoulders should be paying more tax,” he told the Financial Times. “Well, how broad do my shoulders have to be? We paid £400m in taxes as a family last year.”
The Done family, who are collectively worth about £3bn, remain the UK’s biggest taxpayers, according to the Sunday Times Tax List.
Of the £400m they are estimated to have contributed last year, £54m came from machine games duty (MGD), according to the accounts for Betfred Group Holdings Limited.
In theory, that sum would double if Healey follows through with plans to increase the duty rate from 20% to 40%.
However, Done has said such an increase would render hundreds of bookmakers unprofitable at a stroke, forcing him to close them and ultimately reducing the Treasury’s tax take. Casinos have also warned of mass closures.
It is not the first time that Done has threatened mass closures in response to government policy.
Since 2019, the company has threatened to close nearly 1,000 in response to higher taxes or tougher regulation, including the introduction of a £2 cap on fixed-odds betting terminals.
Over that time, the company’s bookmaking estate has shrunk from about 1,620 to 1,293, a decrease of nearly 330. The decline has coincided with a broader shift towards online gambling, with Fred Done appearing in TV adverts urging customers to visit betfred.com.
Campaigners supporting an increase in MGD have focused less on bookies and more on high-street slot machine venues known as adult gaming centres (AGCs), most of which are open 24 hours.
Amid a broader decline in high-street gambling, with the number of bookies steadily shrinking, AGCs have thrived thanks to lax planning and licensing laws, targeting deprived areas in particular for new shop openings.
Andy Burnham has been a vocal critic of AGCs. In August, the prime minister announced measures designed to make it easier for councils to block new venues.
However, some gambling industry figures have warned that AGCs are best-placed to survive a rise in MGD because they have lower overheads than casinos and bookies.
In theory, this means that a rise in the duty could even benefit the sector as rival machine operators retrench. Merkur, the UK’s second-largest AGC operator, has already bid for some of 132 shops that Betfred put up for sale earlier this year.
The Done family declined to comment.