Report
Annual report and accounts 2023 to 2024
The Gambling Commission's 2023 to 2024 Annual report and accounts. For the period 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024.
A fairer market and more informed consumers
Licensees must make their terms and conditions readily available and easy to understand and have in place appropriate policies and procedures for accepting and handling customer complaints in a timely, fair and transparent manner. Gambling products are also required to meet our technical standards which ensure that game rules and transactional information are easily accessible. A key focus of our work during 2023 to 2024 was to obtain greater insights on the issues that matter to consumers and address any related concerns.
In our business plan for 2023 to 2024 we committed to:
- publishing initial outputs from the Consumer Voice programme
- reviewing and, where necessary, updating our approach to tackling non–compliance related to fair and transparent terms and practices including the processing of customer withdrawals.
Our achievements
We are currently working with Yonder to deliver our Consumer Voice research. This uses a variety of methodologies including surveys, online communities, focus groups and life diaries to tap into the experiences of gambling consumers and those affected by gambling in Great Britain. It plays an important role in complementing our data on gambling participation and the prevalence of problem gambling but goes into more depth on key issues and emerging areas of interest.
During 2023 to 2024 we published 2 reports:
Exploring customer journeys using customer-led tools such as gambling management tools to help gamblers manage the amount of time or money they spend, pre-commitment tools to set time or financial limits in advance, and the setting of financial limits for expenditure or losses. This gave useful insights into the awareness of such tools, and people’s use of and attitudes towards them.
Exploring consumer journeys using gambling promotional offers and incentives which looked at: how often and in what ways marketing and bonus offers are presented by operators; how well consumers understand the offers that they engage with; and how this impacts their use of offers. For example, whether offers are facilitating the movement of consumers across different products and brands. The research found that promotional offers are highly valued by consumers but may give rise to behaviours that may demonstrate a risk of harm.
Both reports provided useful insights for the consultations relating to socially responsible incentives and the accessibility of pre-commitment tools; we provide full details of this in the ‘Protecting children and vulnerable people from being harmed by gambling’ section of this report.
In October 2023, we also issued our interim findings from research exploring the impact of recent rises in the cost of living on people’s gambling behaviour. These suggest that the rise in cost of living does not appear to have had a mediating effect on most gamblers’ gambling behaviours, with most behaviours staying the same as they were 12 months previously. However, online gamblers and those who score 8 or more on the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) appear to have felt the negative impacts of increased cost of living on their financial security and wellbeing more strongly. Further analysis exploring the impact of increased cost of living across different demographic groups as well as longitudinal analyses will be included in the final report, due to be published in the coming year.
It is important that the terms and conditions used by licensees are both fair and transparent to their consumers. The number one topic consumers complained about to us during the last year remained the withdrawal of funds from accounts (more than 2,400 complaints during 2023), either due to the length of time people had to wait following a request to withdraw their money, or the amount and type of information operators asked for to process the request. We have completed work in the past with the Competition and Markets Authority and updated the LCCP to clarify licensees’ responsibilities in this area, including the requirement that they do not seek to verify information at the point of withdrawal that they had the opportunity to do earlier in the process. It is important that consumers are treated fairly and that their ability to withdraw funds is not hindered by unreasonable requests and unnecessary delays. Where such practices are identified, we will continue to hold licensees to account.
We completed 58 website reviews which focussed on fair and open elements. Of these, 27 were found to be compliant with minor issues identified in a further 24 websites. These minor issues covered things such as promotional bonus offer terms. The others raised more significant issues requiring further investigation and/or escalation.
Last updated: 17 October 2024
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