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Priority 5 - Continuously improving our organisational effectiveness

Making the Commission a ‘great place to work’

Our people make our work possible. With 286 people across 2 sites in London and Birmingham, expanding to 317 during 2022 to 2023, we’re committed to making the Gambling Commission a great place to work and to improve our Trust Index from 56 percent to 65 percent in our 2022 annual colleague survey.

Three priority areas for improvement were identified in the 2021 annual survey:

  1. Clarifying our strategy and direction.
  2. Leadership.
  3. Communication and engagement.

In 2022 to 2023, we will focus on:

  • embedding our new Learning Zone (launched in 2021) platform and developing career pathways
  • leadership development including launching and embedding new leadership expectations
  • improving our internal communications and engagement with colleagues, including the relaunch of our intranet, streamlining our internal communications channels, and continuing to develop our Colleague Forum (launched in the Autumn of 2021)
  • performance management, including the introduction of a new Performance and Development Review policy along with development support and training for managers in coaching skills and performance management
  • developing our diversity and inclusion strategy, with sponsorship from our Board.

We will continue to follow government guidelines for ensuring COVID-19 safe workplaces and embrace the hybrid approach that we have embedded into our ways of working for the benefit of our people, ensuring everyone has the right support in place. We will also review our office spaces, in partnership with the Government Property Agency (GPA), to make best use of them.

We will manage and maintain our health and wellbeing offer to colleagues as well as reviewing our reward and benefits package.

We aim to improve our recruitment offer by developing our work in equality, diversity, and inclusion.

Our teams and priorities

Continuing to develop our strategy

The Strategy team supports the Executive and Board to ensure a clear strategy is in place, and that our work fits that strategy and is coordinated. They also provide market and regulatory insight.

The Strategy team will continue to work closely with policy colleagues in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and coordinate related activity. The team will continue to liaise with the National Audit Office (NAO) on the implementation of their recommendations on gambling regulation.

Providing high-quality research and statistics

The Research and Statistics team provides insight to the business on how the supply (industry) and demand (consumer) sides of the gambling market work and the risks to the public presented.

The core development initiatives are our data improvement programme - covering both consumer and industry data - and the development of a three-year research plan focused on evidence related to regulatory risks.

Creating impactful and meaningful engagement

Focused on the priorities of the fourth National Lottery licence transition and the Gambling Act Review White Paper, we will provide strategic communications support to the Commission. To support our ambition to achieve Great Place to Work accreditation by October 2022, we will undertake a comprehensive communications programme that builds a sense of trust, authenticity, and community.

Our Contact Centre will continue to operate in line with our Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and we will also improve the way we record the reasons we are contacted. This will help us better identify consumer harm and provide an additional source of intelligence.

Ensuring a high standard of corporate governance

The Governance team will offer secretariat support to the Board, Committees, advisory groups, and internal governance groupings to ensure high quality assurance and decision-making. The Governance team will also maintain our role co-ordinating Regulatory Panels and responses to complaints against the Commission.

Ensuring the Commission’s decision-making is legally robust

Most of the Commission’s legal service requirements are met from an in-house legal team, including public law, prosecutions and regulatory law, contracts and employment law advice across all areas of the Commission’s activities. The team also provides legal advice to the Board and its Committees, except Regulatory Panels which are normally advised by external lawyers.

Monitoring and assuring our finances

The Finance team will continue to deliver timely, accurate and insightful financial and management information within the Commission and to its external stakeholders. We will work hard to ensure that the Commission's costs for United Kingdom (UK) regulation are understood and fully recovered in the fees charged, whilst ensuring sufficient reserves are in place for utilisation should the circumstances arise.

The Commission cannot influence the number or varieties of licences held by operators within the industry, but nevertheless remains predominately dependent on this funding. As a result, there is a need for Finance to increase its focus and expertise on the respective income streams that generate all its fees, to effectively identify opportunities to generate new or incremental income streams and provide greater expertise when refreshing or establishing new fees frameworks.

Improving our digital services and IT infrastructure

The Information Technology (IT) helpdesk service and infrastructure management teams will deliver the final components of our cloud migration.

The Digital team will create a new online confidential reporting service and start the work to develop a regulatory systems replacement roadmap. The team will also perform a discovery and analysis workstream looking at new internal communications tools. A continuous improvement, maintenance, and content management workstream will keep all our digital services up to date and compliant with current legislation. We will commence and contribute to work to improve regulatory data collection.

Improving information security, management, and transparency

The Information Management and Security team will continue processing of Freedom of Information (FOI) and Data Protection Act (DPA) requests in line with statutory timeframes. We will refresh our publication scheme, so that all FOI requests are published, along with the Commission’s response and other transparency information.

In accordance with our latest Internal Audit recommendations on cyber security, we will increase the frequency of our cybersecurity scanning, audit and remediation and conduct a cybersecurity business continuity exercise and response playbooks. We will also improve our documentation around vulnerability and incident management. The output will help inform a full review and redesign of the Commission’s business continuity plans.

Supporting our people

The People Services team will continue to provide professional and considered advice and guidance on all people related matters, including policy.

We will focus on providing more self-service tools to managers, so they can readily access the information they need to manage their people.

Providing assurance on delivery

The Programme Management Office will provide regular reporting to the Executive team, including meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and performance dashboards, risk and assurance management all of which contribute to and support organisational understanding and informed decision making.

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Priority 4 - Increasing the effective use of data by the Commission and the gambling industry
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Financial Forecast
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