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Report

Annual report and accounts 2024 to 2025

The Gambling Commission's 2024 to 2025 annual report and accounts. For the period 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.

Published
15 October 2025

Last updated
15 October 2025 - Changes

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Contents

Strategic Focus 1 - Using data and analytics to make gambling regulation more effective

Technology is advancing rapidly. As the world becomes increasingly digitalised, so does the value of data to improve decision-making, provide insights into consumer behaviour and increase procedural efficiency. As a regulator, our intent is to keep pace with the use of data within the gambling industry to regulate it effectively, and with the public’s expectations to ensure consumer concerns are properly addressed.

During 2024 to 2025, we made progress in the following areas.

Close evidence gaps in priority areas

In July 2023, we published our Evidence Gaps and Priorities programme to help us to close evidence gaps in priority areas across all licensing objectives. The 6 programme themes are:

  • early gambling experiences and gateway products
  • the range and variability of gambling experiences
  • gambling-related harms and vulnerability
  • impact of operator practices
  • product characteristics and risk
  • illegal gambling and crime.

In July 2024, we published an update on the work that had been achieved in year 1 of the programme. An important element of this was reflecting on the extent to which our stakeholders have engaged and aligned their own work with our priority areas. We will only succeed in building robust evidence based on a range of different perspectives, if all those with an interest in gambling share their work.

One of the key vehicles that we use to close evidence gaps is our Consumer Voice programme. This has delivered projects supporting implementation of the Review, including research on gambler attitudes towards Financial Vulnerability and Financial Risk Check proposals. We have also been exploring drivers of consumers’ trust in gambling which can be tracked over time through the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB).

We have procured a framework involving 4 new suppliers to deliver the next phase of this work and provide resilience and diversity going forward. This will enable us to continue to ensure that the voices of consumers are represented in the evidence base that underpins our regulation and will enable us to tackle more complex research questions from our Evidence Gaps and Priorities.

Finally, we delivered our third annual spring conference in March 2025, which this year was titled ‘Building the Bigger Picture’. This brought together over 200 stakeholders, including those from the industry, academia, and those with lived experiences of gambling harms, with 3 objectives:

  • to discuss evidence priorities
  • to learn more about the work that the Gambling Commission is doing to build its data capability
  • to assess multiple evidence sources to close evidence gaps.

Revise our approach to regulatory return data

Following consultation, on 1 July 2024, we amended our licence conditions to require all licence holders to submit their regulatory returns on a quarterly, rather than annual, basis. At the same time, we took the opportunity to streamline the number of questions that need to be completed each quarter and to harmonise reporting periods across the industry, enabling greater efficiency for those licensees who hold multiple licences.

Regulatory returns are a vital source of information for us, the government and the public. They provide an understanding of the size and shape of the gambling market in Great Britain as well as other key regulatory data. The changes made provide a timelier, deeper and more accurate understanding of the gambling sector. They enable us to be better informed about current market conditions and the impact of any regulatory changes. The changes also have a material impact on our ability to budget, since we will gain an improved capacity to understand income levels and forecast more accurately.

Complete the full launch of the GSGB

In July 2024, we published the first annual report from the new Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB). This is the new source of official statistics on gambling behaviours in Great Britain, designed and developed by the Commission in partnership with the National Centre for Social Research and the University of Glasgow over several years. The GSGB will significantly increase the depth of our understanding of the gambling market and consumer behaviour, by collecting data from a large sample of respondents each year.

The launch of the first GSGB annual report was accompanied by a webinar, which over 200 stakeholders attended. Alongside the report, a series of data tables and an interactive dashboard were published on our website so users could access the data in a variety of formats. Subsequently in February 2025, the raw data from the GSGB was published to the UK Data Service to increase its visibility and potential for collaboration and reuse. 2 further in-depth reports, also published in February 2025, helped to sharpen our understanding of both product risk and the range and availability of gambling experiences by understanding how motivations to gamble vary by product. These findings help to build our evidence base around gambling, enabling more informed, effective and precise regulatory actions in the future.

Pilot industry data project

We have collaborated with a small group of operators, who volunteered to take part in the project, to develop our approach to obtaining a regular feed of core data that will give us up-to-date insight into how people’s gambling is changing. This dataset will be invaluable for future policy development and evaluation of new policies when they are introduced.

The purpose of this pilot is to establish a mechanism for obtaining data and to ensure the approach is cost-effective, has appropriate levels of security, and is subject to the right governance.

We have defined our requirements for the dataset, established data sharing agreements and updated our privacy statement. A test transfer of data will be undertaken early in 2025 to 2026 before a regular feed is implemented.

Build on the Commission’s capacity to use, report on and analyse data

Our new Data Innovation Hub has invested in a core team, including the recruitment of data scientists and a data engineer, to give us more of the necessary skills to undertake in-depth data analytics work. We have reviewed our underlying technology platform and are identifying options so that we can make cost effective investments in the infrastructure we need.

We have accessed new datasets and deployed them for operational purposes - such as tracking trends in unlicensed gambling and using data to target our disruption of unlicensed websites. We have also invested in our broader data culture by using internal communications to help colleagues understand the role data can play in their day-to-day work and how to make the most of these opportunities with confidence.

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