Strategy
National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms 2019 to 2022
The sole aim of this three-year (2019 to 2022) National Strategy was to move faster and go further to reduce gambling harms.
Research programme
The Gambling Commission's 2018 to 2022 research programme (PDF) is required to progress the delivery of the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms. It is based on six core research themes.
These themes have been set on the advice of the Advisory Board for Safer Gambling (ABSG) (opens in new tab).
Theme 1: Gambling related harms
"We need to develop a way to comprehensively understand and measure the harms caused by gambling."
Theme 2: Patterns of play
"We need to understand how gambling behaviour varies across different products and environments, and which characteristics are most strong associated with harm."
Theme 3: Changes in gambling behaviour over time
"We need to understand how gambling behaviour changes over time and why people move in and out of harmful play."
Theme 4: What works in harm-minimisation?
"We need to use evaluations to assess the effectiveness of interventions, and identify best practice in industry-based harm minimisation."
Theme 5: Education and prevention
"We need to understand what works in preventative education through insights provided by research and evaluation."
Theme 6: Treatment
"We need to understand what works in gambling treatment and build the evidence base to help formulate an effective and inclusive approach to treating gambling related harms."
These themes will enable us to be ambitious in our research objectives and deliver large scale projects which will provide robust evidence to feed into a complex, evolving policy environment and support the Evaluation enabler of the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms.
It will allow the research to be commissioned through consortium teams which encourage the involvement of experts and specialists new to the field of gambling.
Research governance
The Gambling Commission own the research programme and set the research questions on the advice of ABSG. Currently, the Commission and GambleAware both take responsibility for the commissioning of the research necessary to underpin the strategy.
The majority of funding for commissioned research is either supplied voluntarily by the industry or becomes available through regulatory settlements.
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Defining, measuring and monitoring gambling-related harms
Last updated: 27 September 2022
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Callout added to detail that the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms ran until April 2022.