Brent Green Party Launches Community Fightback Against Fresh 24-Hour Kilburn “Bingo Hall” Bid and Invasive Facial Recognition Plans

 The large premises of the former Santander Bank on Kilburn High Road (Instant Streetview)

 

The Brent Green Party has launched an urgent community fightback against a fresh application by Golden Slots (Southern) Limited to open a new “Bingo” and 24-hour slot machine venue at the former Santander bank branch at 131–135 Kilburn High Road, NW6 7HS.

This latest application comes as local authorities and communities continue to wait for long-overdue statutory reform to the Gambling Act 2005—specifically the repeal of the notorious Section 153 “aim to permit” mandate, which legally pressures councils to presume approval for gambling applications. At Brent Civic Centre, the Brent Labour Party recently brought forward a Gambling Harms Emergency Motion at Full Council, finally and formally acknowledging the full scale of addiction and harm across the borough.

However, warm words and council motions do not stop predatory operators from targeting local high streets. Brent already suffers from over 80 licensed gambling premises, extracting an estimated £18 million annually from local communities and concentrated overwhelmingly in the borough’s most socio-economically vulnerable areas. Until the legal framework actually changes, Brent residents are forced, time and again, to fight every single expansion, variation, and new application from the ground up. It is in this context that the Brent Green Party is mobilising residents once again to defend Kilburn High Road.

Round Two at 131–135 Kilburn High Road: Coming Back “Guns Blazing”

Earlier this year, Macau Casino Slots applied to transform the exact same former Santander bank branch into a gambling hub. Following a powerful, multi-week grassroots mobilisation campaign led by local residents and Green Party campaigners, hundreds of formal objections flooded in. Confronted with determined, well-organised community pushback right ahead of the council licensing hearing, the applicant formally withdrew the application.

Now, the gambling industry has returned to the same site with a new applicant—Golden Slots (Southern) Limited—coming back guns blazing with a series of calculated approaches in its Local Area Risk Assessment (LARA) designed to convince Brent’s Licensing Sub-Committee that the venue will cause no harm to the community.

Despite applying for a “Bingo Premises Licence” (with bingo offered between 09:00 and midnight), the operator’s paperwork reveals plans to keep its “ancillary gaming-machine area” open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—L, operating purely as an overnight slot machine arcade between midnight and 09:00 when no bingo is even played.

Weaponising Invasive Facial Recognition Technology as “Safeguarding”

Most troublingly, in an effort to mask the severe risks of opening a 24-hour gambling venue in a high-deprivation area already saturated with at least seven other gambling premises and multiple pawnbrokers within 400 metres, Golden Slots is proposing the mandatory installation of invasive facial recognition entry screening alongside a “Verified Player Access” registration scheme.

The Brent Green Party is raising severe concerns over the deployment of biometric surveillance on Kilburn High Road:

• Biometric Mass Surveillance on Our High Street: The Green Party has consistently opposed the rollout of live and biometric facial recognition technology, both by the state and by private corporations, as a disproportionate, privacy-eroding intrusion into civil liberties. Subjecting residents to biometric face scanning and longitudinal tracking by a private gambling company raises profound data protection, consent, and human rights concerns.
• Algorithmic Bias in a Diverse Community: Facial recognition systems are notoriously prone to higher false-match and error rates across ethnic minority groups, women, and younger people. Deploying this technology on Kilburn High Road, one of London’s most multicultural and diverse corridors, risks discriminatory false alerts and unfair targeting.
• A “Tech-Wash” Distraction from Unacceptable Harm: Facial recognition is a surveillance tool, not a public health solution. It cannot prevent a person from gambling beyond their means, nor does it mitigate the cumulative impact of clustering another 24-hour slot arcade next to schools, bus stops, and cash converters.
• Unresolved High Risks & Unproven Legality: Remarkably, the applicant’s own risk assessment admits that its facial recognition system has not yet received the required Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), lawful-processing approvals, or technical sign-offs. Even more tellingly, the operator explicitly excludes facial recognition from its own risk scoring—and still forecasts 12 separate “High” target risks across child protection, concealed gambling harm, financial hardship, cumulative exposure, overnight fatigue, and local crime and disorder.

Cllr Suzanne Gallagher, Brent Green Party, said:

We are still waiting for Westminster to deliver on its promise to reform the Gambling Act 2005 and scrap the ‘aim to permit’ rules, and while Brent Labour has finally passed an emergency motion recognising the £18 million extracted from our communities every year by over 80 gambling venues, motions alone won’t stop Golden Slots. Until the law changes, residents have to fight every single application on the ground.

Earlier this year, our community came together in their hundreds and forced Macau Casino Slots to back down and withdraw their bid for the old Santander bank. Now, Golden Slots has come back guns blazing at the exact same address, attempting to dress up a 24-hour slot machine operation as a ‘bingo hall’ and dangling invasive facial recognition technology to convince the licensing committee they won’t cause harm.

The Green Party is clear: biometric surveillance is not safeguarding. Scanning people’s faces and harvesting sensitive biometric data on a diverse high street is a deeply troubling invasion of privacy and a smokescreen that does nothing to stop financial exploitation or cumulative gambling harm. Even the operator’s own risk assessment admits that 12 separate ‘High’ risks remain unresolved. We beat this proposal once, and we are calling on every Kilburn resident, business, and community group to submit a fresh objection before 2 December so we can beat it again.

How Residents Can Object (Deadline: Wednesday 2 December 2026)

Because this is a brand-new application by a different operator, previous objections against the withdrawn Macau Casino Slots application do not carry over. Residents must submit a fresh representation before 2 December 2026:

• Email: Send objections to Brent Council’s Licensing Team at business.licence@brent.gov.uk
• Reference: Application for a Bingo Premises Licence – Golden Slots (Southern) Limited, 131–135 Kilburn High Road, London, NW6 7HS
• Requirements: Include your full name and postal address, and link your objection to the statutory licensing objectives under the Gambling Act 2005:
  • Protecting children and other vulnerable people from being harmed or exploited by gambling (citing the 12 unresolved “High” risks, 24-hour slot machine operation, local deprivation, proximity to schools and pawnbrokers, and the inadequacy of unproven facial recognition surveillance).
  • Preventing gambling from being a source of crime or disorder (citing the 3,238 recorded crime and anti-social behaviour incidents in the Kilburn area over the past year and the strain of 24-hour opening on the night-time economy).
  • Ensuring that gambling is conducted in a fair and open way (challenging the use of a Bingo licence to run a 24-hour gaming machine venue where bingo ceases at midnight). 

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