Policy
Lived Experience Advisory Panel: Managing conflicts of interest policy
The policy on managing conflicts of interest for the Gambling Commission's Lived Experience Advisory Panel. The policy aims to maintain public trust and confidence.
Protecting children and vulnerable people from being harmed by gambling
Gambling related harm continues to be a public health concern. As the gambling regulator, our main impact on the gambling industry is in setting the requirements all of the businesses we license must meet to reduce the risk of their customers experiencing gambling-related harm. The requirements we impose on licensees include controls to prevent children and young people from accessing age-restricted products.
We monitor and take enforcement action against non-compliant activities and practices that place children and other vulnerable people at increased risk. Through our research and policy work, we ensure that licensees are equipped to identify those at most risk of harm and put in place policies and procedures to mitigate them.
During 2023 to 2024 we committed to:
- consulting on proposed changes to our Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice (LCCP) in connection with the White Paper
- supporting industry-led initiatives to enhance player protections including the solution to the single customer view challenge and harm detection good practice
- launching the official Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB)
- publishing the evidence gaps and priorities assessment
- completing the scoping phase for industry data-sharing pilots.
Our achievements
Following the publication of the Gambling Act Review White Paper, we issued consultations on proposed changes to the LCCP and Remote gambling and Technical Standards (RTS) during the summer and autumn which included recommendations specifically linked to this priority. The proposed changes included:
- improving customer choice on direct marketing
- strengthening age verification in premises
- reducing financial vulnerability and financial risk in the remote gambling sector
- reviewing socially responsible incentives to ensure incentives such as free bets and bonuses do not encourage excessive or harmful gambling
- making sure that consumers who want to make use of pre-commitment tools can do so easily and with minimum friction
- implementing improved transparency on customer funds for those gambling licensees with a ‘not protected’ rating.
These consultations closed in February and March 2024. The issue that proved to be most controversial was that related to financial risk checks. This is a complex area as we aim to protect vulnerable people from harm whilst respecting the freedom of others to gamble freely. Due to the range of issues raised and level of interest shown across the spectrum of views, we committed to a step-by-step approach to implementation and a pilot on the enhanced financial risk assessments to test the process and impacts on consumers. Our formal responses to the first set of consultations were published early in the new financial year. Whilst we were able to publish the response in March 2024, publication was held back to enable co-ordination with Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on other aspects of the White Paper.
Outside the White Paper, we strengthened several LCCP Social Responsibility Codes which licensees must follow as a condition of holding their licences in the following ways.
We published the Commission’s approach to ‘vulnerability’. We clarified the duty on licensees to take this into account when considering factors that might make a customer more vulnerable to experiencing gambling harms, and a duty to have systems in place to take action when vulnerability is identified (this relates to SR Code 3.4.3).
We extended the requirement to participate in the GAMSTOP multi-operator self-exclusion scheme to all gambling licensees that make and accept bets by telephone and email from 1 April 2024 (SR Code 3.5.5).
We added an additional reportable event that requires all gambling licensees to inform us when they become aware that a person who has gambled with them has died by suicide. This also came into effect from 1 April 2024 (SR Code 15.1.2).
We will monitor the effectiveness of these as part of our ongoing compliance assessments.
In terms of our support for industry-led initiatives, during the course of the year a single customer view challenge solution, GamProtect, was trialled and implemented across four of our largest operators. Work continues to encourage the rollout of the solution more widely and to encourage further development of the solution to meet the goals of the challenge as originally laid out.
In November 2023, we published the findings from the final step in our 3-year development of the GSGB. The new approach is aimed at improving the way we collect data on adult gambling participation and the prevalence of those who experience difficulties or harms through their gambling. We have invested significant resources and worked alongside relevant experts to develop an improved consumer gambling survey. One of the key things we set out to achieve was to update the way we ask about gambling participation to include a set of core participation and impact measures, but also modular questions which will allow us to ask questions about topical themes and policy issues as needed. We commissioned an independent review of the methodology, ahead of it becoming our official statistics later in 2024, from Professor Patrick Sturgis of the London School of Economics. His report was published in February 2024. He concluded that our development of the new approach was “exemplary” and “followed industry standards of best practice in developing a mixed-mode push-to-web design that will yield high quality estimates of gambling prevalence in Great Britain on a quarterly and annual basis in the years ahead”. As expected, he also made several recommendations relating to the methodology “to ensure the quality and robustness of the statistics continues to build stakeholder and public confidence”. These recommendations will provide vital areas of focus for us as we evaluate and evolve our approach once the new survey is properly live.
Alongside the updated survey, in July 2023, we published our evidence gaps and priorities for 2023 to 2026 to significantly improve the evidence base for gambling in Great Britain. These are not the sole responsibility of the Commission to work on; they are relevant also to researchers, third sector bodies and the gambling industry.
In November 2023, we published the 2023 Young People and Gambling Report, which collected information on the almost 3,500 participants’ gambling behaviour, attitudes and awareness. To improve the breadth and quality of data, this research included 17-year-olds and pupils from independent schools for the first time. Such reports are important in helping us understand how many young people are spending their own money on gambling, how or why they choose to gamble, the types of gambling they are participating in and with whom, and measuring those who are at risk of harm according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (DSM-IV-MR-J).
We completed the scoping phase for increased data sharing with industry, which included exploring different ways of accessing and using data, completing data impact assessments, and importantly liaising with the Information Commissioner’s Office. This is an integral part of our data strategy for the coming years in our drive to make gambling regulation more effective and therefore improve outcomes for consumers.
Last updated: 17 October 2024
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