UK Chip Parade › Editorial policy
How we work
The method, written down so you can argue with it
Every brand in the line-up goes through the same four checks against the public register, and the resulting band is our opinion rather than anyone else’s rating.
A comparison is only worth reading if you can see how it was made. This page sets out exactly what we check, where the information comes from, and where our judgement starts and the verifiable facts stop.
Sources, in order of authority
- The Gambling Commission public register. The authority for licence status, the legal licensee, the account number, the licensed activities, the dates those activities came into force, the registered web addresses and any recorded regulatory action.
- The operator’s own legal pages. Terms and conditions, licensing statements and responsible gambling pages, used to check whether the company the site names matches the company on the register.
- Regulator and support-service guidance. Used for the general explanations on this site — how licensing works, what account controls operators must provide, where to find help.
Third-party review sites, affiliate aggregators, press releases and operator marketing are not treated as sources of fact. They can point us at something worth checking, but nothing reaches our tables on their word alone.
The four checks
- 1. Product match
- The licensee must hold a current remote casino authorisation. A betting licence is not enough, however much casino content sits on the front page. We record the date that authorisation started.
- 2. Licensee clarity
- The company named in the site’s terms must be the company on the register, and the address in your browser must appear in that licensee’s registered domain list. Where the register lists a different address from the one we were pointed at, we publish the registered one.
- 3. Register history
- We record how many regulatory actions the register shows against the licensee. We report the count and link to the register; we do not paraphrase the content of individual cases.
- 4. Time on the record
- How long the remote casino authorisation has been in force. This is a proxy for how much compliance history exists to judge, not a measure of quality.
How the bands are decided
The four checks produce one of three labels. They are editorial opinion, they belong to this publication alone, and they are not a rating, endorsement or approval from any regulator.
- Excellent — a long-standing casino authorisation, a clearly named licensee matching the register, a registered address that matches the live site, and nothing recorded against the licence.
- Strong — the licence position is solid and long-established, with one material qualification on the record, such as enforcement history or an unusually narrow product footprint.
- Mixed — the licence is current and correctly matched, but there is little history to judge, typically because the online casino side is recent.
No band is a prediction. None of them says anything about your chances of winning, which are set by the games and not by the paperwork.
What we will not publish
- Bonus amounts, wagering requirements, minimum deposits, withdrawal speeds, support hours, payment availability or game and provider counts. These change constantly and cannot be verified from a stable public source, so they are absent by design rather than by oversight.
- Player review scores or review counts of our own. We do not run a ratings panel, so we do not pretend to have one.
- Anything framing gambling as income, investment, a way out of debt, a route to status or a skill that improves your odds.
- Any suggestion that a regulator or support charity endorses this site or the brands in it.
Independence
The site earns commission on outbound links, as explained in the affiliate disclosure. Commercial terms play no part in the four checks and no part in the band. Where a licensee has enforcement history, we publish the count whether or not we hold a commercial relationship with that brand. Nobody outside the site sees a page before it goes live, and no operator has approval rights over anything written here.
Reviews, updates and mistakes
Licence records are re-checked when we revise a page and whenever a reader tells us something looks wrong. Each page carries the date it was last reviewed, and those dates are real. If a licence lapses, a licensee changes or a registered address moves, the affected brand comes out of the line-up until the record is clear again.
We make mistakes like anyone else. When we find one that changes the meaning of a page, we fix it and say so — the process is on the corrections page.
Last reviewed 27 August 2026.