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GSGB Review and response to OSR report

Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) Review and response to Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) report

Published
24 July 2025

Last updated
24 July 2025 - Changes

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  1. Contents
  2. Overview of GSGB

Overview of GSGB

Following comprehensive development, the Gambling Commission launched the collection of the data for the new Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) in July 2023. The first annual report based on the first period of official statistics data collection (Year 1; July 2023 to February 2024) was published in July 2024.

The GSGB was developed to:

  • collect data on people’s gambling behaviours, including participation, attitudes towards gambling and the potential adverse consequences of gambling
  • provide a rolling programme of data collection to give the Commission the ability to gain timely insights and respond to emerging trends
  • produce and publish official statistics on gambling participation and prevalence statistics in accordance with the standards set out by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) in the  Code of Practice for Statistics (opens in new tab).

As a new source of official statistics, the Commission asked the OSR to undertake a review of the GSGB to assess its compliance against the Code of Practice for Statistics, to build trust amongst our users and to help inform the continued development of the survey. In May 2025, the OSR published their review of the GSGB (opens in new tab), and came to the following conclusion:

The Gambling Commission has undertaken a huge amount of work in developing and delivering the GSGB, and we commend the efforts and commitment of the team. In commissioning Professor Patrick Sturgis as an independent expert to review the GSGB methodology, the Gambling Commission has gained a valuable external perspective that identifies key areas of focus for the next phase of the survey development.

However, significantly more work is needed to address the recommendations made by Professor Sturgis, and to better support the appropriate use of these statistics by better understanding, and more effectively communicating, the uncertainty of the GSGB estimates.

This report sets out not only our response to the OSR assessment but also describes work already completed in line with the recommendations and reflects more generally on how the GSGB is being used. We developed the GSGB to provide us with a timely, robust dataset on gambling behaviours in Great Britain, which would allow us to track trends over time but it is important to understand how the data is being used and applied by others within the gambling sector, and whether it is meeting the needs of our users. We have drawn on web usage statistics, examples of how GSGB is being used and a variety of user engagement and stakeholder feedback that we have received since the launch of the GSGB, including from OSR.

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GSGB Review and response to OSR report - How GSGB is being used
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