Eyes down on the data
Over the past year, the Research and Statistics team have been working with the Bingo Association to assess the comparability of data collected by the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) with data held by the Bingo Association.
Posted 9 April 2026 by Amandeep Manku
Today we have published a report which investigates the coherence and comparability of estimates from the GSGB with industry data from the Bingo Association.
What was the problem?
The GSGB (2024) estimated that 3.3 percent of adults aged 18 and over have played bingo in a venue in the past 4 weeks. However, the Bingo Association approached us with a concern because the participation estimates for those playing bingo in person didn’t tally with their own data on admissions into bingo clubs. We set about to try and understand why.
What did we do?
The GSGB provides the flexibility to add new questions to the survey on a fairly regular basis, so we worked with the Bingo Association to design a new question to pop on the survey to delve into people’s bingo habits in a bit more detail.
We came up with a list of places where people may play bingo, in a traditional bingo club but also in a variety of other places – taking inspiration from a member of our team’s own experiences of playing bingo in a village hall as part of a school fundraiser!
We added the question to the next available wave of GSGB fieldwork and started collecting our findings.
What did we find?
Once we had one wave of data available we shared the findings with the Bingo Association. We both decided it was worth keeping the question on the survey and collecting data over a few waves to build up the number of responses.
We now have three waves of data under our belt, and the findings illustrate the variety of places where people play bingo. We also found the GSGB estimates of those people playing bingo in traditional bingo clubs (1.2 percent) much more closely aligned with the Bingo Association’s own estimates calculated from admissions data into those premises (1.0 percent).
What’s next?
We’d like to do some more analysis of the demographic profiles of people playing bingo in different venues, but we need to build our sample of respondents up a little bit more before we can do this. It’s been a really useful exercise and has helped us to understand some of the reasons behind the differences we were initially seeing across the two sets of data.
What was the experience like?
Miles Baron of the Bingo Association shares his views of working with the Gambling Commission on this project:
“The Bingo Association are fortunate that they collect detailed industry data which allowed them to cross reference and subsequently question findings from the GSGB regarding participation rates for bingo.
"The Bingo Association are grateful for the opportunity to input an additional survey question into the GSGB in attempt to understand the differences.
"We now have more clarity on why there are differences, although there are further questions to explore once there is a bigger sample size.”