Gambling Act Review: Evaluation Update
Our Director of Policy Bryony Sheldon provides an update on work evaluating the Gambling Act Review in partnership with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Posted 5 December 2024 by Bryony Sheldon
Since the publication of the previous Government’s Gambling Act Review White Paper in April 2023, the Gambling Commission has been working to deliver an ambitious and complex programme of policy change alongside the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and other stakeholders.
In addition to policy development, we have been working to ensure the outcomes and impacts of such changes can be robustly monitored and evaluated, and importantly that we can capture any lessons to be learned. This contributes to the Gambling Commission’s Corporate Strategy 2024 to 2027 commitment to increase our capacity to evaluate new requirements and policies.
In March 2024, in partnership with DCMS, we announced we were working with the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) to design an approach to evaluating Gambling Act Review and the individual policies that contribute to it. Today, DCMS has published details of the planned evaluation (opens in new tab) - including the questions we want the evaluation to answer, the types of data we plan to collect, the research methods used to collect the data, and the research governance arrangements in place.
Evaluation requires involvement and cooperation from a wide variety of stakeholders. In taking forward work on the Gambling Act Review, we have engaged extensively and will continue to do so, both informally and through formal consultation, which has included questions about evaluation. The experience of consumers, operators and other stakeholder groups will be a key part of the evaluation in the coming months, as we welcome participation in surveys, interviews and other planned research. We will also use existing Gambling Commission advisory groups, and Industry Forum to both promote participation in the evaluation and help shape how we collect data efficiently. You can read more about these groups on our website.
Further research governance structures have been established to assist with quality, robustness and representation. This includes a Lived Experience Panel and an Advisory Group, independently administered by NatCen consistent with best practice in research. Our continued dialogue with operators, through a range of routes, allows us to do likewise without the need to establish a bespoke group.
The Advisory Group will bring together practitioners, researchers, academics and evaluators with expertise and experience in the field of gambling policy, research and regulation to provide expert advice and input on the monitoring and evaluation of the measures implemented following the Gambling Act Review.
Meanwhile, the role of the Lived Experience Panel is to provide ongoing support, guidance, and input on the progress of the evaluation of the Gambling Act Review from the perspective of people with lived experience of gambling. This includes individuals with experience of gambling with no adverse effects, as well as those experiencing harm. There is some overlap in the membership of the Gambling Commission’s existing Lived Experience Advisory Group and the project specific group convened for the purposes of this evaluation.
Inevitably, the evaluation will involve choices and some pragmatism in terms of where to prioritise efforts. We are finalising where best to invest the resource and expertise of NatCen within the 60 plus measures of the Gambling Act Review White Paper, with a view to commencing fieldwork in the coming months.
The Commission and NatCen will be reaching out to stakeholders in the coming weeks, and more details will be published into 2025.