The Gambling Commission has published statistics from the second year of its controversial and highly criticised Gambling Survey for Great Britain, which reveals overall gambling participation remained steady at 48 percent, while the rate of problem gambling was comparable to 2023 figures, despite a larger sample size.
The findings from the second year of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain have revealed gambling participation across the country remained steady at 48 percent – falling to 28 percent when discounting the National Lottery – a rise of just one percentage point on 2023.
Publishing the results, the Gambling Commission reported that 42 percent of all those who gambled in the previous 12 months had a positive experience, with 72 percent of respondents reporting they place bets “because gambling is fun.”
“The Gambling Survey for Great Britain is a key building block of the evidence base which helps government, industry and other partners understand both gambling behaviour and potential consequences from gambling,” said CEO Andrew Rhodes.
“This year’s findings deepen our understanding of consequences from gambling and provide crucial insight into risk profiles among those who gamble most frequently. We strongly encourage operators to use this evidence to consider the risks within their own customer bases.”
Et tu Brute. The Gambling Commission, too, should be using the evidence to consider their own methodological bases for the GSGB – something, in fairness, they’ve made some effort to do with their concessions in response to the OSR assault on the validity of the survey.
But it’s a little late for the 2024 stats. According to the Commission’s figures, 2.7 percent of the 19,714 survey participants scored above Eight on the Problem Gambling Severity Index, a figure comparable to the 2.5 percent recorded in 2023, when the sample size was 9,742 people.
Though the increase could push the overall UK problem gambling rate above the estimated 0.3 percent based on previous surveys, recent advancements in the Commission’s methodology mean the regulator is discouraging active annual comparison.
Good luck with that: the misleading messaging coming out of the GSGB has already been published across the media, all making the very comparisons the Commission is trying to avoid: the GC’s 2.7 problem gambling rate versus the far more credible HSE survey of 0.3 percent.
It is a difference that causes considerable embarrassment to the regulator hence its caveat note to the latest GSGB results. “The push-to-web methodology of this survey means that estimates presented in this report are not directly comparable with results from prior gambling or health surveys and such comparisons should not be used to assess trends over time. The GSGB data outlined in this report represents the second year of a new baseline.”
That new baseline is effectively the Commission seeking to rewrite around 15 years of problem gambling research via the NHS. Given the 9-fold difference between the two, something is clearly still not right.
Using the larger sample size, the Commission also produced two additional reports into risk profiles among people who gamble on a weekly basis, and the potential negative consequences of gambling.
The first report highlights the risk profiles among people who gamble on a weekly basis, identifying a variance of risk not only between gambling products, but also within product categories themselves, while the second report “broadens our understanding of the potential negative consequences of gambling.”
Commission’s new survey continues to muddy the waters
The Gambling Commission’s latest GSGB report continues to muddy statistical waters by headlining the problem gambling rate among active gamblers rather than the wider population.
Earlier surveys, including the Health Survey for England and those using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), measured problem gambling as a proportion of the total adult population. These studies consistently found that rates remained between 0.6 percent and 0.9 percent from 1999 to 2015. Since adopting the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) in 2016, that figure has stabilised around 0.3 percent.
Under the GSGB, however, the Commission now highlights the rate of severe problem gambling among those who gamble – recorded at 2.7 percent in 2024 – rather than among all adults. The survey also employs a new push-to-web methodology and a much larger sample size, which the Commission says improves accuracy but makes comparisons with older datasets impossible.
This focus on relative rates within the gambling population has led to higher headline figures, even though the broader data indicates that problem gambling has remained low and stable for decades. Many analysts have remarked on how poorly the transition to the regulator’s new survey was handled, with the media pouncing on every opportunity to misreport the new statistics – and many believe the Commission is still not doing enough to set the story straight.
