A practice to deceive?

Gambling Commission spins a tangled web

Britain’s gambling market regulator, the Gambling Commission knowingly misrepresented research on the prevalence of gambling harms in the run-up to last year’s Budget statement – according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (‘FOIA’). The disclosures indicate – as next.io has reported this week – that the Commission may have broken rules designed to govern the conduct of public servants, including the Civil Service Code.

At the centre of the controversy is a study published in August last year by researchers from the London School of Economics (‘LSE’) and NatCen. The study (Sturgis et al., 2025) used three experiments to test for the effect of different biases on survey results, to help explain why the Commission’s Gambling Survey for Great Britain (‘GSGB’) produces much higher estimates of gambling participation and potentially harmful gambling than NHS surveys. Findings from the study were consistent with previous research but largely inconclusive. Headline results support the hypothesis that otherwise identical surveys produce higher estimates of gambling and ‘at risk/problem gambling’ where the topic is described as ‘betting, lotteries and games’ (rather than ‘health, wellbeing and recreation’) and where it is conducted online (rather than by telephone). If anything, the results of the experiments appeared to support concerns that the GSGB over-estimates participation and prevalence; but not much new was learned.

On 6^th August - eight days before the study was published - the Gambling Commission wrote to the LSE to ask whether the experiments might be used to justify a loosening of guidance on the GSGB. The Commission explained that unnamed ‘stakeholders’ wanted to have some of the restrictions on use of statistics to be removed – particularly the stipulation that the GSGB should not be used to provide population estimates of the prevalence of ‘problem gambling’. The LSE replied in the negative, with the researcher approached by the Commission writing, “I don’t think the experimental results really makes much difference to this [the GSGB guidance]”. In the weeks that followed, two of the Commission’s own officers warned that the LSE/NatCen study could not be used to justify a relaxation of GSGB guidance; but on 2^nd October, the Commission did just that. The regulator declared (without explaining why) that the results of the experiments provided greater confidence in the GSGB and loosened its guidelines in accordance with the wishes of the unnamed stakeholders. One Commission officer wrote at the time “hopefully we will get less reports of misuse in the future”, because the grounds for making complaints had been narrowed.

In January, the Gambling Commission claimed that the LSE/NatCen study absolved it of responsibility to apply more prominent reliability disclaimers to the GSGB, as had been recommended by the Office for Statistics Regulation the previous May. Why this should be the case was not explained.

Further FOIA disclosures show that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was unaware of the Commission’s sleight of hand. The market regulator appears therefore to have knowingly misrepresented the significance of the LSE/NatCen study to the Government as well as to the OSR and the public. The Commission’s conduct appears therefore to be in breach of the Civil Service Code, the Nolan Principles on Public Life and the UK Statistics Authority’s Code of Practice for Statistics. Evidence of misrepresentation was provided to the Commission in January this year. So far, the regulator has not disputed the accuracy of the evidence.

In a further development, the Gambling Commission has refused two FOIA applications to disclose the information it provided to HM Treasury in the run-up to the Budget, arguing that to do so would not be in the public interest. This is also problematic. In January, its outgoing CEO, Andrew Rhodes, revealed on a podcast, that the information provided by the Commission to Treasury suggested caution where changes to duty rates were concerned. The Commission’s refusal to release that information raises several questions regarding the conduct of both bodies. Did Treasury ignore the gambling market regulator? Was the information supplied accurate? Did the Commission really suggest that caution was the best policy? If the Commission restricted its commentary to facts and figures rather than advice, why is it so reluctant that anyone else should see it? The episode carries echoes of its refusal – for more than three years -to release evidence showing strong consumer opposition to affordability checks.

Based on the information that is in the public domain, the Gambling Commission appears to have contributed positively to HM Treasury’s decision to hike online taxes. According to papers from its now defunct Advisory Board for Safer Gambling, the Commission discussed lobbying Treasury officials on the economic costs of gambling and spoke of its desire “to find the thing that hurts” the licensed industry. It facilitated the funding (at £140,050 in quasi-public money) of a shockingly inept report on the fiscal costs of gambling by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (‘NIESR’). The Commission ignored complaints that NIESR had broken funding rules, and the Social Market Foundation used the report to lobby for hikes on gambling duties.

Over the course of the last five years, the Gambling Commission has funnelled millions of Pounds into anti-gambling activism, published statistics on gambling harm in the knowledge that they are unreliable, promoted anti-gambling speech codes, agitated for a tax increase on licensees (the Statutory Levy) and presided over the mushrooming of the illegal market for gambling in Great Britain (having initially sought to downplay legitimate concerns). According to a poll this year from More in Common, just 33% of British adults trust the Gambling Commission. It seems likely that the figure is even lower amongst those whom the Commission regulates. Whoever is appointed as the regulator’s ‘new broom’ would do well to reflect on the culture that permits the weaving of such tangled webs. Problems swept under the carpet tend to accumulate rather than disappear.