Gambling Commission

It was our pleasure to welcome the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority, who visited us in Birmingham last week 🌍 We were delighted to welcome Mr Bashir Are and his team to the UK to discuss common challenges and opportunities for collaboration in an ever-expanding global gambling industry. As part of the visit, we invited the team to visit local betting shops and casinos, to show how operators in Great Britain remain compliant with our regulations. Since the IAGR (International Association of Gaming Regulators) conference in Botswana last year, we’ve been proactive in further strengthening our engagement with emerging African gambling jurisdictions. This meeting was another successful step in sharing our learnings around gambling trends and technologies, the illegal market and how we can better share data to make gambling safer, fairer and crime free for our respective organisations. Huge thanks to Mr Bashir Are, Mr Samuel Rowland and Mr Hassan Faruq for accepting the invitation to join us, and our Policy and Enforcement colleagues Ian Angus, Rab Grewal, Katherine Jackson, Katherine Wilson, Elizabeth Potter and Jamie Wall for the hard work in ensuring our guests took insightful learnings away with them. We hope the trip was both enlightening and productive, and we look forward to seeing the team again in the near future, both at IAGR and GRAF (Gambling Regulators African Forum).

Dr. Rachel Volberg of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is one of the world’s leading experts of gambling and gambling related harms, having been a prominent researcher in the field since 1985. We were therefore delighted to receive her endorsement for our new Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB), and in particular, around the questions regarding gambling related harms. Dr. Volberg said: “The Gambling Commission has engaged in a thoughtful and thorough process to develop new questions to assess the extent of gambling harms in Great Britain. The new questions include harms experienced by gamblers but also, and importantly, harms experienced from someone else’s gambling. We look forward to seeing the results of this new direction in the assessment of gambling harms and anticipate that the data obtained in the new Gambling Survey for Great Britain will be of great interest to gambling scholars around the world.” A thank you to Dr Volberg and her team for continuing to work with us on developing such an important project.    To read the GSGB annual report, and read more about the survey, visit our blog site 💻 https://lnkd.in/eDdjfM2b

One of the reasons we’re so proud to launch the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) is due to the excellent work our colleagues and partners have done to make the largest survey of its kind as robust, transparent and consistent as possible.  A significant milestone for us came earlier this year after an independent review from Professor Patrick Sturgis of the The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sturgis said: “The new design of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain will significantly enhance the evidence base on patterns and trends in gambling behaviour. With an annual sample size of 20,000 individual interviews across the nations and regions of Great Britain, the survey will provide researchers and policy makers with fine-grained and timely data across a broad range of key indicators. Using a push-to-web mixed mode design and random probability sampling from the Postcode Address File, the survey implements state-of-the-art methodology to a very high standard"    We’ll continue to improve on the feedback of experts like Professor Sturgis to ensure the GSGB builds on its strong foundations.  To learn more about the GSGB and read the first annual report, visit our blog site 💻 https://lnkd.in/eDdjfM2b

We’re delighted to share with you our first ever Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) Annual Report, which has launched today. It’s the biggest survey of its kind in the country, with the most robust, transparent and consistent data collection we’ve ever had from across England, Scotland, and Wales.  Through GSGB we’ll be able to better understand consumer behaviours, as and when they’re happening, giving us the best possible view of how people gamble, their motives and the consequences it has on them as consumers.  Knowing how and why consumers gamble in Great Britain – to the extent GSGB will allow us - gives us the strongest possible foundation to identify trends that’ll enable us to make data-led decisions around future policy and engagement within the sector. As GSGB advances over the coming years, it’ll go a long way to ensuring that gambling remains safer, fairer and crime free in Great Britain, and we can’t wait to share more with you.  Thank you to National Centre for Social Research and University of Glasgow, whose ongoing insight, knowledge, collaboration and expertise has helped us reach this important milestone. To read more about the GSGB, you can read our Director of Research and Statistics, Ben Haden’s blog post on our website 💻 https://lnkd.in/eDdjfM2b

In our latest blog post, our Chief Executive, Andrew Rhodes, talks about our key issues and expectations concerning account withdrawals.   Complaints about withdrawals are proportionately low compared to completed withdrawals across the industry, but it remains the most frequent reason that consumers contact us.   “By improving our understanding of what’s important to consumers, we’ll be better able to direct our resources and future regulatory activity. We’ll continue to support the gambling industry in Britain to better understand where consumer interests lie. In the meantime, it’s imperative that operators review their terms and practices on withdrawals on an ongoing basis, to ensure they’re acting compliantly and are treating their customers fairly.”   To read more about our actions around account withdrawals, go to our blog site 💻 https://lnkd.in/eU62HgZT

From 1 July, all licensees are required, by changes to our Licence Conditions and Code of Practice (LCCP), to submit their regulatory returns on a quarterly basis 📆 In our latest blog post, jason davies, our Data Analytics Manager, talks about how these improvements will synchronise reporting periods for all licensees and make it easier to analyse changes in the market on a much more timely basis. To read about these changes, and what it will mean for licensees, visit our blog site 💻 https://lnkd.in/eMy5c9yk

Today we’ve launched official guidance for our first annual Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB), which is due to be published next week. The GSGB is the largest survey of its kind in the country and uses a brand new, robust and independently endorsed methodology that differs from all of our previous official statistics. This guidance is intended to help everyone interpret these statistics clearly, with transparency and accuracy, giving those who wish to use them an understanding of how they should and shouldn’t be applied. To read the guidance, visit our website 💻 https://lnkd.in/eP3vyDTj #GamblingSurveyForGreatBritain | #GSGB

As the regulator for the National Lottery, we're sending our best wishes to all of our lottery funded Team GB athletes as they head off for the Olympic Games in Paris next week. Good luck from everyone at the Gambling Commission - we're right behind you! 🥇 #TNLAthletes | #Paris2024 | #OlympicGames | Paris 2024 - Comité d'organisation des Jeux Olympiques et Paralympiques de 2024

The second wave of results for our Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) have been published ✅   Here, we’ve focused on the gambling activities people have taken part in between November 2023 and February 2024, exploring ways people have taken part in gambling, what motivates people to gamble and how they felt about their recent gambling experiences.   Our first annual report on the Gambling Survey for Great Britain will be published on 25 July, combining data collected from our first two waves to give us insight into gambling behaviours from 10,000 participants. In future years, this will increase to 20,000 respondents across four waves in a yearly cycle, giving us a comprehensive overview of the gambling behaviours as from the biggest survey of its kind in Great Britain. Helen Bryce, our Head of Statistics, said: “By combining responses across multiple waves we’ll be able to go into more detail about how responses vary across different population sub-groups, and will also publish more data in the annual report about consequences of gambling.”   To read Helen’s blog post in full, go to our website 💻 https://lnkd.in/dhRKXQUE

Welcome to Lisa Nandy, who we look forward to working alongside as our new Secretary of State for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.    As Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, appoints his team, we'll welcome our incoming ministers and work closely with them in the coming months and years. Together, we'll continue our mission of protecting consumers, meeting the challenges of a growing global industry, and delivering the important work of making gambling safer, fairer and crime-free in Great Britain.