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Board minutes for 7 February 2024

Venue: Remote meeting Time: 09:30 to 13:00

Attendees:

  • Anna van der Gaag (AVDG) (Chair)
  • Cath Cooney (CC)
  • Philip Newall (PN)
  • Ulla Romild (UR)
  • Stephen Sharman (SS)
  • David Zendle (DZ).

In attendance:

Apologies:

  • GC colleagues
  • REDACTED (Paper 3)
  • REDACTED
  • REDACTED
  • Jane West (JW)

1. Welcome, apologies and declarations of interest.

Board Members were welcomed to the meeting and apologies were noted.

No new declarations of interest were raised.

2. Minutes, matters arising from 16 November 2023.

The note of 16 November meeting was shared and agreed.

Only one set of meeting notes moving forward will be taken and published on ABSG webpages within one month of the meeting.

3. Chair’s Report

The following key points were reflected on:

  • There was a longer Chair’s report than usual to summarise the work of 2023 and reflect on the work for 2024, along with learnings gathered from recent one to one annual reviews with members
  • ABSG provides the Commission with access to a wide range of skills and expertise related to gambling
  • An ABSG member recently visited the GC and observed that the Commission is ‘data rich’ but felt it was not exploiting this as much as may be helpful. They looked forward to closer working with GC colleagues on this in 2024. Other members of ABSG looked forward to similar visits in 2024.

REDACTED. Another area of work where ABSG have expertise is in translating findings from research into language that is accessible and understood by a wider audience. There are also clear opportunities to work with the team on the Gambling Harms survey and other statistical work where ABSG members have expertise.

An ABSG member commented that the explanations around the framing and financial risk policy need a strong evidence base.

Another member commented that interpreting results and analysis in only 2 days a month can be challenging, would time be better spent having shorter discussions which may give a new dimension to the work. This would firstly provide the GC with a better use of ABSG and secondly provide two different levels that ABSG could support the GC in, namely the GC bring plans to ABSG and then react to them and in addition becoming more involved in projects via smaller groups.

ABSG members commented that in the longer term finding a way of involving other experts via an anonymised data interface which becomes available to a wider range of independent researchers was important to expanding the evidence base for the benefit of all. Data sharing in this way had become more commonplace across government agencies in recent years and was a welcome development.

The critical part is continually linking all the work back to regulatory purpose.

4. REDACTED

5. Data Update: Data Innovation Hub

ABSG received an update on the data strategy and the progress that had been made through this programme of work.

The access to You Gov open banking data combined with demographic data has progressed well and some points were provided to illustrate and how useful this will be to the GC. The YouGov data will continue to be a rich data source. It will allow the GC to follow up and contact individuals who wish to participate in more in-depth research on gambling expenditure and how they are impacted by this.

GC’s priorities continue to be around the evidence gaps identified in last year’s paper. The GC want to take the learning from other regulators and integrate this into the work.

ABSG welcomed the progress made on GC capacity building, (a recommendation ABSG made in its Progress Report in 2022) the pilots, and other projects and looked forward to hearing further updates and ways ABSG could support this workstream.

6. AOB

Members were asked to consider an options paper on establishing a GC consumer panel. Engagement with regular gamblers was considered to be a challenge for a number of reasons.

Regular gamblers were a disparate group, difficult to define.

They had little reason to be actively engaged with regulation because it rarely if ever had an impact on them directly.

Engagement with this group was a challenge for all regulators, not just GC.

The role of gambling regulation was to protect consumers from harm, by making gambling safer, fairer and free from crime. New technologies and online products had increased the risk of harm and regulatory focus was therefore rightly on addressing this and raising standards across online operators.

ABSG commented that the regular gambler was recognised as a voice that could be viewed as missing from these debates. However, there was agreement that GC’s three-year commissioned work with Yonder, involving market research with over 7,000 consumers, was the most effective place to seek the views and experience of regular gamblers and to use this input when deciding on policy going forward.

Creating a new panel or advisory group, or appointing a consumer champion, was not supported as a means of achieving this. To therefore find a person to fill such a role would be difficult given the diversity within this population of gamblers and therefore open the Commission to criticism.

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