UK body suggests Gambling Commission should improve use of data
The Institute of Licensing recommends combining statistics with other datasets and improving methodology and stakeholder engagement.
UK.- The Institute of Licensing (IoL), the professional association for licensing practitioners in the UK, is urging the British Gambling Commission to make changes to how it approaches the use of data and statistics for its Gambling Survey of Great Britain (GSGB). It has suggested that the regulator should improve both its methodology and stakeholder engagement.
The body warned that it was important to increase user confidence in the gambling survey. It believes that this would require a more comprehensive improvement plan than that already adopted. It also said the regulator should adopt all of the recommendations made by professor Patrick Sturgis of the London School of Economics and should engage with users to achieve more transparency in its quality assurance and validation processes.
It also said the regulator should consider how to better align the presentation of gambling statistics with user needs and how the survey’s findings could be combined with other datasets, like those from the Health Survey for England and the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, to find correlations. That could see gambling framed as a public health issue.
The report states: “To benefit future statistics development and address diverse stakeholder needs, the Gambling Commission should broaden its stakeholder network and collaborate further with official statistics producers.”
The Gambling Survey of Great Britain is now in its second year and has highlighted trends in the shift to digital gambling, especially among younger customers. The regulator has been gradually publishing findings from the initial waves of the new survey. So far, it has highlighted data suggesting that players are skeptical about operator’s responsible gambling measures and also that money is not the main reason for gambling.
A review of the survey by the Office for Statistics Regulation, part of the UK Statistics Authority, made nine recommendations for improvements but found no reason for the Gambling Commission not to publish data from the survey.
It recommended that the Gambling Commission provide more detailed information on quality assurance and validation processes and that it clearly communicate potential biases that could affect estimates provided. It also proposed the creation of a user engagement strategy, which would set out how users can take part in the development of the survey, and it suggested the regulator collaborate more with other producers of official statistics. The Gambling Commission welcomed the conclusions, noting that some of the proposals had already been actioned.
