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UK gambling officials are worried that an upcoming release of new problem gambling prevalence statistics could “blow up the gambling industry” and potentially derail long-awaited white paper policy changes.
A planned July 25 release of official statistics as part of a reformulated Gambling Survey of Great Britain will undoubtedly produce higher numbers for problem gambling and give ammunition to critics seeking to impose harsh restrictions, said Dan Waugh of Regulus Partners.
“We’re headed for very interesting times,” he said. “It could derail the white paper.”
Preliminary results from the Gambling Survey of Great Britain published last November showed a problem gambling rate of 2.5 percent, or ten times the National Health Service survey rate of 0.25 percent.
Waugh has previously been critical of the survey, saying “legitimate and evidence-based concerns” are likely to produce overestimates of harm.
He also criticised the survey over its approach to suicide, saying: “Questions about something as complex and serious as suicide that are solely concerned with one possible factor are likely to provide little practical insight.”
The Gambling Commission has said that the newer results cannot be compared to the older surveys, as they use different methodologies.
“We have to be very clear, only the methodology has changed, not the problem gambling rate,” said Grainne Hurst, Entain’s corporate affairs director. “We need to be very clear or the controversy’s going to spin out of control.”
Hurst is scheduled to take over soon as chief executive of the Betting and Gaming Council, the UK’s biggest gambling trade group.
Both Hurst and Waugh spoke at the recent KPMG Gibraltar eSummit.
The concern is that the new Labour government elected on July 4 is not wedded to changes proposed in April’s white paper, and it could react to lobby groups seeking a crackdown on issues such as advertising and online slots stakes.
Reforms proposed in the white paper policy document have been deemed acceptable to most of the industry and urgently needed by the land-based industry.
At the KPMG conference, economist Bill Robinson presented data which suggested that gambling is considerably less harmful to society than the UK’s other two “sin” industries, alcohol and tobacco.
Many fewer people also gamble regularly than those who smoke and drink regularly, said Robinson, a former economist with HM Treasury and the European Commission.
His report was part of a presentation in which he predicted that the new Labour government desperate to reduce deficits would find increasing “sin taxes” an easy target when so many other tax increase possibilities — income tax, VAT and national insurance — have been ruled out.
But Hurst suggested that some might challenge Robinson’s conclusions, as they are based on the older numbers suggesting lower levels of harm.
Although Labour politicians have so far had little to say about gambling issues, evidence suggests that they are leaning toward the argument that gambling is a public health issue rather than one of recreation, according to analysts at Peel Hunt.
Public health officials have suggested that gambling be treated more like tobacco, with severe restrictions on marketing, rather than alcohol, which is much more freely available to adults.
The expected new set of statistics is “likely to feed into public policy narrative that problem gambling in the UK is at a higher level than previously thought and that more restrictive regulation is required”, Peel Hunt wrote.
Patrick Sturgis, a professor at the London School of Economics, called the new survey “exemplary in all respects”.
But he also said there was a “non-negligible risk” that the new survey could “substantially overstate” levels of both gambling and gambling harm.
Sarah Gardner, the commission’s deputy chief executive, defended the survey at the KPMG conference against “some seeking to decry the GSGB before it has even been published in full”.
Critics have knocked the report “because we have been open about the areas where we need to exercise some caution, sometimes vocally supporting datasets which support their argument, where there is little or nothing known about how those figures have been constructed”, Gardner said.
“I think everyone can do better than that and there is an obligation on all of us to use research, statistics and insight in a responsible way,” she told the audience.
Earlier, Laura Balla, the commission’s head of research, wrote: “It has never been our intention to develop a headline score or psychometric scale of gambling harms. The wider impacts of gambling are varied and diverse and to develop a single measure or scale would be extremely challenging.
“Instead the new questions will give us insight into the range of experiences and associated trends that different consumers are having and allow us to explore the nuance and complexity of the impacts of gambling in a way that we cannot do if we only use the (earlier statistics),” she said.
