Consultant Andrew Tottenham argues the Gambling Commission is placing too much weight on survey findings that may overstate problem gambling, risking regulation that costs operators their competitive position and consumers their freedom of choice.
The Gambling Commission has come under sustained criticism from industry consultant Andrew Tottenham, who claims the regulator is relying too heavily on survey evidence that may overstate the true extent of problem gambling in Britain.
Writing in his latest industry report, the managing director of Tottenham & Co argued that survey findings should be treated with a “scepticism discount”, warning that “people’s stated intentions and their revealed behaviour are not the same thing”.
Tottenham said the Gambling Commission’s Gambling Survey for Great Britain illustrates the problem. While the survey reports a problem gambling rate of 2.5 percent, he noted that the NHS Health Survey for England has previously estimated rates of around 0.3 to 0.5 percent using the same PGSI threshold.
He pointed to the Commission’s independent statistical review, which identified “a real risk” that the GSGB “substantially overstates the true level of problem gambling”.
“That warning sat in the technical documents, while the headline figures were put in front of policymakers without it,” Tottenham wrote.
He argued that “a gap of that size is far more likely to come from the recruitment methodology than from a real jump in problem gambling.” He added: “That is not necessarily a measure of how much problem gambling exists; it is more likely a measure of who bothered to click.”
Tottenham also criticised the continued use of the claim that gambling causes 400 suicides each year in Britain.
“400 sounds like someone sat down and counted, but nobody did,” he wrote, arguing the figure has been repeated in parliamentary debates despite being derived from applying a Swedish hospital study to UK estimates.
He also took aim at the Commission’s presentation of research showing that 77 percent of respondents opposed affordability checks, saying the published summary described the findings as reflecting “a wide range of views”, which, “in the immortal words of former Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, is being ‘economical with the truth’.”
Tottenham concluded that survey figures can become “laundered through several layers of apparent rigour into being treated as fact”, warning that when regulation is built on overstated survey findings, “the error costs operators their competitive position and consumers their freedom of choice.”
A survey that ‘substantially overstates the true level of problem gambling’
Andrew Tottenham said… “The error costs operators their competitive position and consumers their freedom of choice…
