Business leaders headed to the Gambling Commission’s Spring Conference last month ready and willing for the regulator to get in the weeds with them as to how they work, in the hope that they will be regulated proportionate to their high standards. Did it work?

In wake of the widespread dissemination of dodgy data spread by the discredited Gambling Survey of Great Britain, operators are practically begging the Gambling Commission to come and evaluate their business practices on a more regular basis in the hope for better, proportional regulation: that seems to be the key take-away from the regulator’s annual Spring Conference. 

The event, which took place last month at the Commission’s London headquarters, saw the regulator apparently “delighted” at how eager gambling business is for “more evaluation,” according to the GC’s director of policy Bryony Sheldon. 

But industry beware – when you ask the Commission to evaluate businesses more regularly and re-evaluate more proportionately, they only hear the industry is begging for more evaluation.

That, GamCom, is absolutely not what the industry is telling you! They want you to get out of your ivory tower, make a visit, recognise the work businesses are doing and regulate with proportionality rather than over-bearing and burdensome bureaucracy.

But it’s not necessarily certain whether Bryony Sheldon got this message. “Stakeholders on the day suggested there is appetite for the Commission and policy makers to conduct more evaluation… including further use of piloting policy changes,” she reported. 

Clearly not.

The unspoken context of the industry’s desire is, of course, that if the Commission had an accurate read on how carefully UK gambling conducts its business, it would glean a proper insight on just how absurdly over-stated the case of the anti-gambling lobby in this country is. 

Indeed, one of Sheldon’s key take-aways from the meet was how “value was placed on better engagement, input and collaboration with industry…[to] optimise the quality and availability of data.”

Unfortunately, you only have to see how little the Commission listens to the Industry Forum it set up last year – whose chair Nick Rust, together with its members,  have a depth of knowledge and understanding probably beyond the ken of anyone in office at the Commission. Instead, it’s the bellowing of the lived experience grouping – the self-annointed protector of the 0.2 percent of the population – that seems to have the only sway.

But industry voices at the conference insisted that were such engagement to take place, it would “help evaluators to better understand and take account of industry context, including wider changes that are taking place in the sector.”

You’d think, wouldn’t you?

 “We’ve been pleased to hear stakeholder appetite for evaluation at the Spring Conference and in response to our policy consultations,” the tone deaf Sheldon surmised. “We continue to strengthen our capacity to evaluate new policies, to set clear, evidence-based requirements for licensees.”

But not in the direction the industry is hoping.

And what makes this so much worse is that the Commission insists on using dodgy data as evidence and that will never strengthen the capacity to evaluate new policies. 

As if that was ever the intention?