The regulator has given itself yet another nice, smug pat on the back for the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, despite the Office for Statistics Regulation sounding the alarm as to its flawed methodology leading to dodgy data.
The Gambling Commission has issued a startlingly tepid response to the Office for Statistics Regulation’s critique of some of the findings of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, promising little more than tweaks to a methodology that industry experts, stats boffins, and of course the UK’s national statistics regulator, have argued is fundamentally flawed.
Is this the beginning of a battle of two regulators: one defending the facts and statistical accuracy, the other,abusing it whilst warning others over misusing its own data?
A new self-completion survey method undertaken as part of the GSGB resulted in both a far larger sample size (approximately 20,000) as well as a significantly higher finding of “problem gambling” rates: leaping from 0.7 per cent (as per the NHS Health Survey for England’s face-to-face finding in 2018) to a whopping 2.7 per cent, a figure Regulus Partner’s Dan Waugh decried as contributing to a “charade” of the accurate scale of gambling addiction.
Waugh wasn’t alone in his skepticism: an independent review of the GSGB by LSE stats professor Patrick Stugis last year warned that: “until there is a better understanding of the errors affecting the new survey’s estimates… policy-makers must treat them with due caution, being mindful to the fact there is a non-negligible risk that they substantially over-state the true level of gambling and gambling harm in the population.”
Further review of the GSGB by the OSR validated these concerns, with a report published in May underlining the extent of the divergent methodology between HSE and GSGB datasets, and making explicit the potential for the incorrect use of incorrect addiction data.
Now, you might think all this flak would give the Gambling Commission pause in its response to the OSR: but not so.
In a somewhat defiant riposte posted to the regulator’s website last week, the Commission congratulated itself for what it said was the OSR’s endorsement of the “progress” it had made in undertaking “experimental research,” whilst making vague commitments to correcting biases in the future.
No surprise then, that the lacklustre nature of this reply left Regulus’ Waugh opining that: “One would be hard-pressed to find any acceptance of [the] criticisms in the Gambling Commission’s statement,” adding that with respect to the GSGB, the statement intentionally “downplays the OSR’s own reservations.”
Defiant, deluded and dismissive: meet the gambling regulator
The Gambling Commission was delivered no less than 30 recommendations by the Office for Statistics Regulation following an assessment of the newly formulated Gambling Survey for Great Britain.
The OSR wasn’t overly impressed: 30 things to amend in a timescale mostly by October 2025.
In its response the Gambling Commission was consistent, to say the least. It was as arrogant and self important to its fellow regulator, as it is to the industry it regulates and the government it ignores.
And of those 30 Action points? Iit has completed 5; 6 it declared were ‘not applicable’ … and there were 19 tagged ‘No’ in the completed column.
Genius.
