Transparency and evaluation
Underlying all our recommendations, there is a need for:
- greater transparency required of all operators, whether remote or land-based
- more effective evaluation of the different approaches attempted to reduce harm.
These should be used to focus future regulatory requirements on what works.
Achieving this has the potential to increase accountability and understanding, and to reduce harm more effectively.
The Gambling Commission currently requires operators to provide an Assurance Statement.1 In these documents, operators describe their approach to keeping consumers safe. This is currently a confidential document and operators primarily receive feedback verbally from the Gambling Commission. ABSG recommend making these documents public, so that greater transparency and accountability is created. We also recommend that written feedback should be provided, which would increase operators’ accountability for making year-on-year improvements by creating a clearer audit trail. We recognise this change would create challenges, but we believe this is a necessary next step towards making operators more transparent and accountable, and through this, reducing harms.
We support the development of a mandatory data repository that would make more data on online gambling available to a wider range of independent researchers. This would stimulate more independent research, reduce the current pattern of ad hoc data requests from operators and expand the number of academics able to carry out gambling-related studies.
As highlighted in our advice on the National Strategy,2 the existing evaluation protocol needs updating,3 with more attention being paid to the resources, co-ordination and support required to achieve more widespread evaluation to learn what works.
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Detection of harms
Last updated: 25 March 2021
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