Gambling Survey for Great Britain - Year 2 (2024), Wave 2 results published
Our Head of Statistics, Helen Bryce, talks through recently published data from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain and provides an update on improvements to the design of the survey.
Posted 10 December 2024 by Helen Bryce
On 5 December we published the second wave of data collected via the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) in 2024. Year 2 (2024), Wave 2 is based on responses collected between April and July this year. We have established a consistent pattern of regular publications from the GSGB and can now benefit from having the most current data for the whole of Great Britain at our fingertips. As I said this is the second wave of data published this year, with data collected between January and April 2024 released in September. If you’re interested in seeing a list of upcoming publications, from the GSGB and our other official statistics outputs you can access our calendar of publications.
Whilst overall headline participation (that is the percentage of respondents who tell us they have gambled in the last 4 weeks) has remained stable in Year 2 (2024) Wave 2, at 48 percent, the sample size of circa 5,000 respondents per wave provides enough granularity to see fluctuations and patterns within the data below this headline level.
In this latest wave we can see the impact of large scale events such as the Grand National, Cheltenham Festival and Euro 2024 which took place around the time responses were collected. The proportion of people placing a bet increased to 12.4 percent in this wave from around 9 percent in the last three waves (9.2 percent Wave 1 2024, 9 percent Wave 2 2023, 9.9 percent Wave 1 2023). Within betting, the survey results also show an increase in those saying they had bet on the horses or dogs, up to 6.6 percent from 3.9 percent in the previous wave. We anticipate this percentage may fall back in line with previous waves when we release the Year 2 (2024) Wave 3 data in February next year.
Earlier in the year we started to explore the impact of a large scale betting events in more detail, taking a deep dive into the impact of Euro 2024 on consumer behaviour. This research was undertaken through our Consumer Voice programme which works in parallel with the GSGB and provides the opportunity to explore topics in more depth. You can read more about the findings in our deep dive into Euro 2024 betting blog. There will be further work in this space as our Consumer Voice programme will continue to explore this topic further, feeding into Themes 1 and 2 of our Evidence Gaps and priorities.
Through changes to the way we collect regulatory returns, we’ll also soon be able to make improvements to the frequency and timeliness of our Industry Statistics publications – another core product in our wider evidence base. This means we’ll be in a position to analyse data from the GSGB alongside data from regulatory returns for the same time periods, so when we look at increases or decreases in participation for example, we can analyse the equivalent potential impact on Gross Gambling Yield (GGY). These improvements are all part of the Commission’s plans to improve the core outputs we use within our evidence base.
As we design the next iteration of the GSGB for 2025, we’ve also taken the opportunity to make improvements to the design of the survey going forward. From January 2025, we will be adding new questions linked to the drivers of consumer trust in gambling following work which was conducted by our Consumer Voice programme. We’ll also be adding a new question which we have designed in collaboration with the Bingo Association. This question is designed to find out more about the places where people are playing Bingo to deepen our knowledge of different parts of the sector. We will also be splitting out horse and dog racing into separate categories so we can measure participation in each of these activities.
If you have any feedback about the Year 2 (2024) Wave 2 findings then do please share them with us via communications@gamblingcommission.gov.uk.
We’ve also published a correction to the Year 1 (2023) GSGB data following an error which was identified relating to duplicate cases in the dataset. This has resulted in 62 cases being removed from the final dataset. All of the corrected data is now available on our website, and the raw data from Year 1 (2023) will be published to the UK Data Service shortly.