Press release

25 July 2024

The Gambling Commission has today launched a new gambling survey which is set to become one of the largest in the world and establish a new baseline for understanding gambling behaviour in Britain.

The first annual report of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, produced by National Centre for Social Research and the University of Glasgow, features responses from 9,804 people but will increase to around 20,000 by next year.

The publication provides greater insight into attitudes and gambling behaviours – presenting a fuller picture, illuminating participation rates, the type of gambling activities participated in, experiences and reasons for gambling, and the consequences that gambling can have on individuals and others close to them.

Tim Miller, Executive Director of Research and Policy, said: “One of our aims as a regulator is to ensure we gather the best possible evidence on gambling – and today’s publication is the next significant step forward in our journey on creating a robust source of evidence for gambling in Great Britain.

“Data in this report represents the first year of a new baseline, against which future changes can be compared¹ and as such will prove invaluable in deepening further our understanding of gambling across the country.”

Professor Patrick Sturgis, Professor of Quantitative Social Science at the London School of Economics, added: “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.”

As part of a drive to ensure the new statistics are used correctly the Commission has published guidance on how this data can be interpreted. For example, estimates presented in this report are not directly comparable with results from prior surveys due to the differing methodology, including a bigger sample size. The Commission will always robustly tackle any misuse of official statistics and our guidance sets out how we do this.

Participation

• 48 percent of adults aged 18 and over participated in any form of gambling in the past 4 weeks.
• Gambling participation was 27 percent when those who only participated in lottery draws were excluded.
• Male participants (52 percent) were more likely than female participants (44 percent) to have participated in any gambling in the past 4 weeks.

Experiences of gambling

• When asked to rate their feelings towards gambling 41 percent of adults who gambled in the past 12 months rated the last time they gambled positively, 21 percent gave a negative score and 37 percent gave a neutral score.
• The most common reasons for adults to participate in gambling at least sometimes were: for the chance of winning big money (86 percent) because gambling is fun (70 percent) to make money (58 percent) because it was exciting (55 percent).

Consequences of gambling

• Male participants were more likely than female participants to have higher Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) scores and those aged 18 to 34 had higher PGSI scores than other age groups².
• The proportion of participants with a PGSI score of 8 or more was over 9 times higher for those who had taken part in betting on non-sports events in person relative to all people who had gambled in the past 12 months.
• The proportion of participants with a PGSI score of 8 or more was more than 6 times higher for those who had gambled on online slots, relative to all people who had gambled in the past 12 months.

Note to editors

¹The new push-to-web methodology means estimates presented in this report are not directly comparable with results from prior gambling or health surveys and such comparisons should not be used to assess trends over time. This approach involves selected households receiving a letter through the post asking up to two adults in the household to take part in the survey online. This is supplemented with a paper questionnaire for anyone not online or who prefers an offline approach.

²Some 2.5 percent of respondents had a Problem Gambling Severity Index score of 8 or more but Professor Sturgis noted in his independent review of GSGB (opens in new tab) that estimates of Problem Gambling rates should be used with caution as there is a risk the new methodology substantially overstates the true level of gambling and gambling harm in the population. Given this is both a baseline statistic and further work is being carried out in line with Prof Sturgis recommendations, GSGB statistics should not be used to scale up the prevalence of problem gambling or the consequences of gambling to whole population. Read the Commission’s Guidance on using statistics from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain for more information.

For all media enquiries, please contact the Gambling Commission press office.

Last updated: 25 July 2024