iGaming Daily

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The UK Gambling Commission has published its second year of research and data from the Gambling Survey of Great Britain for 2024. The survey is viewed as the commission's headline data and research project introduced to deliver stronger evidence on gambling behaviors, harms and impacts across the nation. The regulator's CEO, Andrew Rhodes, has described the survey's methodology as the new academic baseline for gambling research. But as most matters with gambling,

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The statistics and findings have proved highly contentious when compared to previous datasets. So what does the Gambling Commission research tell us and why does it differ so much to other bodies of research? Welcome back to iGaming Daily, supported by OptiMove, the creator of positionless marketing and the number one player engagement platform. Are you in Las Vegas for G2E this week? Well, if so, OptiMove is hosting an exclusive sweepstakes industry breakfast. Get market insights and hear from some of the top names in the industry.

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find out more on this can't miss event in the description of this episode. Joining me, Charlie Horner, to jump into this set of data is SBC News editor, Ted Orme Clay. Ted, I'm sure you had a ball of a Thursday going through this data set and writing this one up. How's things? Yeah, good thanks mate. Like you say, it was quite a heavy m Thursday, late morning, early afternoon. There was a lot of stuff to get through with this. um

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as you'd expect, ton of data involved. They've been trying to handle a couple of new things as well with it, think, some methodology and be a bit more, it's kind of self-examining, I think, as to how they've been running it for the past couple of years. So yeah, so there's a lot to get into. And then to top it all off, obviously Thursday for me closed with the Forest Europa League performance, which was, yeah, not the evening I hoped for, but you know, we roll with that. Yeah, a heavy day all around.

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So let's just give a little bit of background on this really. So it's the gambling survey of Great Britain. It's the second year that the gambling commission has done this report. And the commission says that it was to replace the British gambling prevalence survey, which was conducted in 1999, 2007 and 2010, but was cut in 2011 when the coalition government came into power.

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It also follows on from the health survey for England, which is done in coordination with the NHS. I think a lot of what we're going to talk about today is the difference between these reports. Ted, what changes has this survey brought to the research of UK gambling and its prevalence in the sector? Regarding the changes to how the UK Gambling Commission has been attempting to research, that's attempting.

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have been researching this. That sounded like I was not giving them much credit for the work they put into this. They've increased the sample size pretty much doubled it. think it was 9,000 and it was between 9,000 and 10,000 people in last year's for this one. was something like 19,700 I think off the top of my head. So they've had a much bigger sample size they should have done to reduce the margin of error and try and make it more accurate.

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Which obviously is a good thing because with these reports, especially given the quite intense political and regulatory debate around gambling at the moment, is very crucial that research like this is as accurate as possible and helps inform policy as accurately as possible. So, but in terms of like the findings and changes, it seems pretty much broadly similar to what we've seen in previous surveys.

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I mean, we can go into this a bit more lately, but you know, like we say, the methodology of these surveys has changed quite a bit over the years. The, um, even like the measure that we use to, um, gauge the extent of gambling harm and problem gambling in this country has changed. So you can't really always make direct like flight comparisons, but you know, for the purpose of what we're talking about here, this is what we've got. These are the studies we've got in front of us. And overall, it seems like certainly in terms of, let's say how many people are

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considered to be at risk gamblers and therefore the section of them that are considered to be genuinely like actually suffering from problem gambling um That seems to be relatively stable like it wavers a little bit I think it's increased slightly this year, but not to a huge extent so a lot of the findings I think seem quite quite similar, but they have done so they have done some em Interesting stuff. I think we'll get into a bit more with em

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trying to create guidance for operators, I think, and provide more of a platform for them to assist operators engaging in gambling harm and interacting on gambling harm. Obviously, the other thing is these aren't, like I said, there's various other surveys that have been conducted into gambling prevalence in the UK over the past, what, 30 odd years or so. And often, other non-gambling commissions that continue to get done to this day. So you've got like,

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Going way back to the 90s, the British gambling prevalence survey in 1999 and then in 2007, 2010, you've got the health survey for England, which was run from 2012 to 2021. think I cited some of the 2021 data in my report on this for SBCUs on Thursday. And then like you've got more specific ones as well, like the Scottish health survey. So obviously there's lots of different

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analysis and reports and research that the industry should keep in mind um when it looks to influence its own player protection policies and things like that, think, and its own practices. Overall, this one still remains quite a uh predominant one. It's obviously the UK Gamblin Commission's own one. It's the one by our main regulator on this. It's quite a useful one, I think, for the industry to use to inform what it's doing.

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Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the overview there, Ted. We'll jump right into the problem gambling stats after the break, I think, because I think that warrants a much wider discussion. I think to really kick us off and dive into this data set, there must have been a lot for you to sift through. What stood out to you in terms of the data presented from a gambling prevalence and participation angle?

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Was there anything that stood out to you in terms of the way that people are gambling and what form of gambling that people are participating in? One of the things that stuck out to me, and I think this is probably just some of the influence of my role at SBC as editor of Lottery Daily as well, is just how significant the lottery, and in fact, not just the national lottery, but lotteries at large, the society lotteries and so on, postcode lottery would be included in that, which a lot of people play. How significant these are.

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as part of the gambling product mix and really what people engage with. So if I'm just looking at the stats right now, so the survey found that 60 % of adults in the UK, obviously from the ones that surveyed, just under 20,000 people surveyed, 60 % had gambled in the past 12 months. And on a monthly basis, so in the previous four weeks to them participating in the survey, 48 % of adults.

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reported gambling activity, but this drops to 41 % over 12 months and 28 % in the previous four weeks when adults who only play national lottery draws are excluded. think this is, and again, this is something like I mentioned earlier, the survey has kind of repeated a lot of the same results as the last one and as like the HSE and things like that and other surveys in this area. m

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This is a very similar trend we've seen over many years. The National Lottery is a really, really significant product in this country. As you'd expect, really, it's very low risk, which is something else that the report actually identified as well with some of the risk profiles I'll talk about later. Obviously, it's just a lot more easy access, I guess. People can go and buy a lottery ticket when they nip in to buy a pint of milk from the shop or whatever. Whilst, yeah, the...

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betting and betting shops and casinos are a more of a separate kind of not quite closed off, but I think for many people it's like the ease of access might not be as a, or the motivation to go and do it might not be as strong as the lottery. So that was something that stood out quite a bit. There was something as well I noticed about uh retail and online betting. It showed that as expected, I think the

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participation in online betting is significantly lapping in-person betting. This was something that we also saw mirrored in the gambling commission's stats on gross gambling yield back in, I think, what was that for? That was for the first quarter of the 2025-2026 financial year, which showed the retail GUI dropped by something like, oh, actually, know what, Tommy, I'd forgotten what the figure was. I'm sorry.

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retail GDUI dropped, online GDUI was up. Anything about that corresponds to what we're seeing with the participation as well. um The other side of the data thing was em the risk profiles, they're quite significant. It's really interesting how you bring up the national lottery and how prevalent it is. Something I noticed as well was that there seems to be this big shift towards people playing the lottery online as well and buying the tickets online, which was uh a

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big part of Alwyn's mandate when they took over the fourth National Lottery License Contract was they would modernize the lottery and bring some of that online. So I think that was quite interesting to see how people were interacting with the lottery in a different way to how you would traditionally, like you say Ted, you go and get your pint of milk and you pick up a lottery ticket on the way out as well. So, you know, we've looked at...

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of the online retail mix, but does the report tell us anything new about the characteristics of UK gambling overall or do we think that we've boxed that one off with the stats that we've already talked about already? This is when I'm going to talk a bit more about, I know I've mentioned it several times already, but these risk profiles that the commission has written up, I found this to be one of the more particularly interesting things from this. know it is something that's been

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kind of discussed before, I think, and they've reiterated a couple of findings from previously. this, I think this is designed to try and help inform operators about who your most at-risk customers will be, kind of give them a, know, this is an industry that the customer base transcends many different segments of life, like socioeconomic, geographies.

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age groups, ethnic backgrounds, gender, whatever. A lot of people will have different factors of where they live and how they grew up and what the financial situation is and so on that will impact how at risk they are when it comes to gambling. The commission stated that people who gamble weekly on any activity, there's a few factors associated with more likely to live in deprived areas.

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more likely to have fewer qualifications and more likely to live in social housing. Now, this was a stat, a conclusion, I guess you'd say, more of a stat that I do find very interesting in the context of a lot of the political debates and calls for action we've seen over the past couple of months. Obviously, we've talked about this on the podcast before. One of the biggest calls we're seeing at the moment is around the powers that local authorities have around licensing.

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and a lot of the motivation behind this and the MPs are involved in it and the local councils as well. Obviously, we talked before about there's like 39 local councils, think, including Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, we're now seeing kind of getting pipped as a potential Labour leader in some of the debates we're seeing at the moment, so the political discussion. They've been calling for more powers for councils because they're concerned about the prevalence of gambling businesses in low-income areas.

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I think betting shops obviously a part of that in particular though, it's adult gaming centers, places with slot machines and so on. em And I think this figure here, this conclusion that the Gammon Commission has come to with these risk profiles will probably add a bit more weight to that argument, I think. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see this getting cited in some debates in parliament or some more letters from councils and so on moving forward. I found that particularly interesting for that reason.

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Yeah, I think that is a really sharp point there, Ted. think that we'll talk about the problem gambling stats quickly after the break, but uh prevalence also comes into these discussions as much as problem gambling rates also feed into the political debate. There is this perception that betting is everywhere. It's not just in your pockets on the high street. It's everywhere on the high street and people can always access betting shots.

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the slot machines, etc. Of course, the industry would come back and say that betting shops are supporting the high streets when the high streets are struggling in this country, it's bringing jobs to the retail sector, and perhaps there's also a struggle for jobs in retail as well. um But yeah, think that's certainly going to feed into political debate, and I think that does highlight why it's so important that there is

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data recorded on the prevalence of gambling online and in retail. But Ted, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and talk about all the problem gambling stats because that's a whole other conversation in itself. Welcome back to iGaming Daily. Today we're talking all about the gambling survey for Great Britain for 2024 and look, the problem gambling stats are always going to be the main headlines of these.

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and the gambling commission works on the PGSI system to rank problem gambling rates within the country. And I think it's generally considered that anyone with a PGSI score of 8 or above is considered to be at most risk of problem gambling. Now, that rate in this report is 2.7%, which is kind of consistent with the 2023 report.

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But uh as we've noted, I think we noted on the podcast at the time and we've noted on the sites, and this is something we should take into consideration, it's much higher than some of the other reports, particularly the Health Survey for England report series, which had problem gambling rates much lower. Ted, let's jump into this because it is an area of dispute because there is changes in the methodology of the survey.

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Why is this an area of dispute? Why are we getting such varied figures and how much can we read into this? I know it's a lot to throw at you there, good luck. I'll try my best to answer this well. Maths is never my strong point in school, so I always get very scared when I see data. So I think part of this is to do with...

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Some of this is to do with the change in how gambling harm was measured over the years. So before, and we're going back quite a few years to like way before I was working at SBC. And so in fact, I think some of this will go back before I was even working in the industry back when had a, know, part-time job in betting shops. But the most common metrics you measure gambling harm in the UK for many years from like the nineties through to the early to mid 2010s was the

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DSM for which is like a measurement of mental illnesses, mental disorders, I think, and things like that. Which was that was what was used by the UK Government Commission and I think as well that is what has informed the NHS, the health study for England ones as well in the 2010s. the

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In 2016, I think that was the year the gambling commission then switched to using the problem gambling severity index, the PGSI score, which is one way you and me would be more familiar with Charlie because that's dominated the research into this and the time that you and me have been working in this area. em The thing with that is obviously it uses a series of questions and if you get a score basically of eight or more, I think that's when you're considered at risk of gambling.

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Some of the criticisms of it that I've heard is I think some people think it might be a bit too broad of some of the questions and that it could be too easy to be classified as at-risk gambling. Although at the same time, I've also heard some people criticizing it for being, m you know, not being in-depth enough. So there are two different m arguments to that, probably depending on what your, yeah, well, depending on what your opinion is and where you sit within the industry, I guess. m The commission has as well, though.

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taken, like I said earlier, quite early on in this podcast, have been a bit more self-reflective with this one. They announced this about a month or two ago, I think, that they were going to have a look at how the surveys can potentially lead to biases. Obviously, it's quite a common sociological study of how you need to be careful with questionnaires, that you don't have leading questions and things like that, and you don't potentially inform someone's answer to it before they've even answered it. They looked at that and just

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I tried to have look at things like whether explicitly mentioning gambling in a survey could have an effect on how someone responds, em whether being asked questions by an interviewer might have more of an impact on whether you're just filling them out as like a questionnaire, here's your questionnaire, fill it out yourself sort of thing. m

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And kind of related to the PGSI score thing, think they've had to look at whether being presented with a longer and updated list of gambling activities might impact someone's estimate of how much they participate of their gambling prevalence. yeah, I I guess just to sort of summarize that and there's not really an answer. There's still an area of dispute just because it's an incredibly complex topic.

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It's an incredibly difficult one to research accurately because of, you know, like we said earlier, so many different consumers have different factors that influence them. They have different product preferences and so on. Like it's not an easy one to nail down. it is. It's really difficult, but I think it is, I think it's crucial to note that the gambling commission's survey has resulted in a much higher problem gambling rate than previous studies. And so there is always going to be that.

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That point of contention with lots of stakeholders questioning the reliability of this data, how can they trust numbers when there are two completely different answers? I before the survey of 2023, I think the highest problem gambling rate that we'd seen on average was about 0.3%. So now it's up to 2.7%.

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some people might make the conclusion that there's millions more people in this country who have a problem with their gambling. indeed, The Guardian has written a report saying that 1.4 million adults in Britain have a gambling problem. So it does open the doors to criticism, to contention. It just shows that stats are stats.

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in the eye of the beholder really. How can we ensure that this data is communicated in a way that is easily understandable for the public so that we can really have a uh more agreed upon problem gambling rate, something that we can rely on, something that we can take and trust moving forward?

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Just to clarify something, think, I know you mentioned there that the rate, the rate of Sinclair-Peirce we've gone from 0.3 to 2.7, I don't think the 2.7 figure is actually meant to be taken as like problem gambling. That's people who are considered at risk from the PGSI score and then a certain percentage of them will then be considered at risk of problem gambling, I think. I think that kind of shows, like this discussion you and me have just literally had this second kind of illustrates the importance of

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how you pull this data across, isn't it? Because it like say it can be interpreted differently by different people based on their own opinion, maybe even like a pre-existing opinion they've got of the industry, whether you're in favor of looser regulation or whether you're in favor of tighter regulation, you could probably interpret this data to support your viewpoint, couldn't you? So I think a lot of it is to do with how the commission will put this across and then how it...

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and how you relate it to other surveys that are conducted as well, how you relate it to experience we've got of the most successful, let's say, intervention measures and treatment measures, how we use it in a lot of educational material as well. There's lots of charities out there, many of whom you and me have spoken to before, who do a lot of good work in the educational side of things, working with younger people, working with athletes and so on.

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to spread awareness of the risk of gambling related harm and how to avoid that, how to stay in control, how to keep things, keep betting and gaming as a source of entertainment and not as a, yeah, not having become problematic. It's how you relate the stats to all of that really, but sometimes I look at that and I think that's bit beyond me, I'm afraid. And my abilities as a statistician. em

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Yeah, it's almost a similar answer to the one of the research we had before. There's just so many different factors of play here and there's a lot in there you need to get right. Yeah, and the gambling commission is portraying the survey as the official stats with methodological documentation, external peer reviews. And it's really trying to position this as the flagship study for...

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gambling statistics in the UK, and rightly so because they are the national regulator. We need an official body of research to understand what's happening in the sector, particularly at time when there's such heightened political scrutiny on the sector. We're just coming out of the white paper uh review period, took, that was a uh period of about five years where the industry was in a regulatory

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sort of black hole really. They didn't know what was coming or going. And now we're in this period where there's a heightened debate around the taxation of the sector due to this perception that online slots are taking more than they're given essentially. we do need a heightened focus on the stats and making sure there is official data. With that being said, Ted, what does the commission...

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say about the survey? it satisfied with the outcomes? um Will the methodology be changed again going forward or do we think that they're happy with this as a methodology going forward and we'll be able to make much clearer comparisons as we move forward? Yeah, from what I've seen from the way the commission has presented the results and from what Andrew Rhodes, commission's chief executive said in the release, they seem quite confident in it. mean,

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I think we've already said this already. think they should be commended for taking the time to try and make the survey more accurate because they recognize the importance of that by expanding the sample size to try and make it more representative and reduce the margin of error by being reflective on how could questions induce biases and things like that. I think that's examples of good research practice that the commission's had.

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I mean, as well, you you mentioned the Gamble and Agri, throughout that two and a half year process, the commission talked a lot about how it wanted to see the industry and itself like make more use of data, how they wanted to learn from the financial services sector in particular and how data is collected and distributed and leveraged to inform policy. I think it's good to see that they are taking steps, you know, to not just talk to talk and walk the walk with that, with the research they've been doing and trying to make it more accurate and representative.

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So that's a positive move. But yeah, they seem quite confident in it. em Andrew Rhodes obviously said about how this will hopefully inform policy moving forward. They've talked about how they want to build on the measures that already implemented from the Gambling Act review, like the...

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the ban on cross-selling bonuses and the financial risk checks and things like that. I mean, they have hinted that more controls are going to come forward. So we should expect this research to inform policy as we go forward. And I think they're quite confident in the way that the survey has been mapped out. So yeah, maybe we'll see some future changes to the methodology, but I think that will be more building on and expanding on what they've done rather than like doing a

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an overhaul of it. think they're quite confident in what they've done here. Brilliant. Well, Ted, I think that's a good place as ever to leave the conversation. Thanks very much for your time and your hard work dissecting and crunching the numbers there and providing your sharp insights. And thank you very much to the audience for listening to another episode of iGaming Daily. If you want to read all about the gambling survey for Great Britain 2024, we'll leave a link in the description for you to take a look at Ted's coverage.

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and please do feel free to take a look at the rest of the SBC News site. We've got coverage of all the European m sportsbook and online casino coverage. uh Check out all across the SBC News network and tune in tomorrow to another episode of iGaming Daily to hear all about the latest global gambling news.