British gambling participation dips in final quarter of 2024
The Gambling Commission’s latest survey shows a drop in overall participation, but the rate holds steady when excluding lottery games.
UK.- The Gambling Commission has released its latest data on gambling participation in Britain corresponding to the period from September to January 2025. The proportion of people who said they had gambled in the prior four weeks dropped by three percentage points from 49 per cent for Q3 2024 to 46 per cent for the final quarter of the year.
That’s when including National Lottery and charity lotter draws, which remain the largest segment. Some 19 per cent of respondents only partook in this form of gambling. Excluding them. the participation rate in other forms of gambling was 28 per cent, in line with the previous quarter.
The upshot of that is that it was the lottery segment that saw a downturn in participation, which is confirmed in the segment participation numbers. The proportion of people who took part in lottery draws was down by three points from 37 to 34 per cent.
Scratchcard participation was 12 per cent, betting 10 per cent and online instant win games 7 per cent. Online gambling participation was 37 per cent including lottery. Excluding this sector the rate climbed one point from 16 to 17 per cent.
Conducted by NatCen, the data comes from a survey of 5,191 adults conducted between September 2024 and January of this year.
Gambling yield
As for revenue, online gross gambling yield rose by 7 per cent year-on-year to £1.45bn, driven by a rise of 11 per cent in the yield from online slots to £689m. Online real event betting GGY increased by 5 per cent year-on-year to £596m.
Offline betting GGY fell by 3 per cent to £554m. The sum of over-the-counter bets dropped by 6 per cent, but GGY held steady at £152m. Self-service betting terminals generated £125m, down by 1 per cent year-on-year.
The figures are based on data submitted by between 80 and 85 per cent of operators.
Financial risk pilot
Meawhile, the Gambling Commission has published an update on its ongoing pilot of financial risk assessments. Written by director of major policy projects Helen Rhodes, the update focuses on Stage two of the pilot and the issues being explored in the third and final stage.
In the second stage of the pilot, approximately 1.7 million financial risk assessments were conducted across three credit reference agencies in relation to approximately 860,000 accounts. Rhodes says this increase from stage one was due to the design of stage two and is not indicative of how many accounts might be assessed in a live environment.
