British Gambling Commission to publish second Gambling Survey for Great Britain report
The regulator is implementing recommendations made by the Office for Statistics Regulation.
UK.- The British Gambling Commission has provided an update on its progress implementing recommendations made by the Office for Statistics Regulation on the new Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB). The response comes as the regulator prepares to publish a new annual report from the survey.
The Gambling Commission received the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) review in May and published its full response last month. While it said then that it had already taken some actions, other work had yet to be implemented.
In its update, the Gambling Commission noted that one of the recommendations was to strengthen user engagement among statistics users. To this end, it held its first GSGB Statistics User Group meeting on July 29 with over 50 people in attendance.
It says the initial meeting focused on establishing a community of users and setting expectations, explaining the purpose of the group and getting feedback on how the user group would like to be involved in the GSGB. Participants also talked about the publication of the second annual report, with the Gambling Commission taking input into how to develop outputs.
Guidance update following research on gambling survey methodology
On August 14, findings were published from experimental work on the GSGB methodology undertaken by the London School of Economics and NatCen. This work was carried out in response to the recommendations made in Professor Sturgis’ independent review published back in February 2024.
The research focused on the impact of the survey’s methodology change in the way the official statistics on gambling behaviours are collected, in particular focusing on topic salience, social desirability bias and the impact of updating the gambling activity list in the survey to better reflect the online activities people now engage in. The regulator said the research had provided much greater clarity on the implications of the methodological changes. As a result, it will be updating the accompanying guidance for GSGB statistics.
Second Annual Report of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain
The Gambling Commission said it was preparing for the launch of the Second Annual Report of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain based on data collected during 2024. The report will be published on October 2 2025 and the regulator will host a webinar on the same day for anyone interested in hearing the latest findings. Feedback from the GSGB Statistics User Group is being incorporated into the publication, particularly around the data held within the Power Bi dashboard.
Given the extensive data collected through the GSGB, two supplementary reports will be released alongside the official statistics in order to provide a deeper exploration of the findings. One of these will focus specifically on people who gamble more frequently (those who reported gambling at least weekly in the past four weeks). The other will look more closely at the profile of people who said they had experienced negative consequences of gambling.
The raw data from Year 2 (2024) will be archived to the UK Data Service in early 2026.
