Report
GSGB Review and response to OSR report
Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) Review and response to Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) report
Response to OSR’s assessment of the GSGB
As a new official statistic we asked the OSR to undertake an assessment of GSGB, to assess the GSGB statistics against the Code of Practice for Statistics and to help inform the continued development of the GSGB. We have been in regular contact with the OSR since the start of the review and as such have been able to make improvements along the way based on the feedback they gave us. This means that in our response to their report, we can already refer to several enhancements that have been put in place.
We are really pleased that the OSR recognised in their review the amount of work that has gone into the development of the GSGB and that we have some clear recommendations which will help us to continue to develop our new official statistics and further strengthen our adherence to the Code of Practice. The OSR also published a public statement (opens in new tab) in response to specific concerns that had been raised by some individuals in relation to GSGB, which we think has brought further clarity.
In this section we respond to the recommendations in the OSR report, setting out the progress we have already made and the actions we intend to take.
Actions in response to Professor Sturgis review
The OSR recommends that to improve user confidence in the GSGB, the Gambling Commission should develop a more detailed and comprehensive improvement plan to communicate how Professor Sturgis’ recommendations will be actioned (Recommendation 1).
In February 2024, Professor Sturgis published his independent assessment of the GSGB. The independent review (opens in new tab) assessed the GSGB’s methodological approach and made recommendations for improvements focusing on how the Commission should address unresolved issues relating to how the shift to self-completion has affected estimates of gambling behaviours.
Since the OSR review was carried out an independent team at the National Centre for Social Research and Professor Sturgis and Professor Kuha at the London School of Economics have been commissioned, following an open procurement, to undertake experimental research to implement the recommendations. We updated the survey improvement plan on our website in April 2025 with this information. We also held a webinar on 8 April to launch the project, with around 100 stakeholders in attendance. We shared a timeline at the webinar, with results from the experimental research due to be published in Summer 2025. The second annual GSGB report (based on data collected in 2024) will now be published on 2 October 2025, so that we can take on board the feedback from the experimental research in the annual report.
We have also updated the survey improvement plan with regards to Recommendation 7 from Professor Sturgis’s report, to explain that we will be able to benchmark results from the GSGB against the 2024 Health Survey for England when that is published at the end of the year and against the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS) published in June 2025.
We will continue to add more detail to the survey improvement plan as we implement the recommendations from Professor Sturgis’s report.
Quality Assurance
The OSR recommends that the Gambling Commission should provide more detailed information on its quality assurance and validation processes to assure users and enhance confidence in the GSGB data.
GSGB data is subject to a series of steps in terms of quality assurance. Following data collection, GSGB data first undergoes quality assurance by the National Centre for Social Research. The data is then passed to the Commission, who undertake further quality assurance steps. The National Centre for Social Research’s approach to quality assurance is detailed within the technical report, this contains information on how the National Centre for Social Research deal with duplicate records, survey speeders and full details of the weighting that is applied. Information on the quality assurance the Commission carry out is also available on our website. The Commission will review the technical report ahead of the publication of the 2024 GSGB Annual Report, bringing this information into one place and providing further details where applicable.
In Summer 2025 the Commission will also publish a new research governance framework which will underpin quality assurance and research quality. When we have completed the work to implement both the recommendations from Professor Sturgis and the recommendations from OSR, we will review the benefits and timing of securing accredited official statistics status for the GSGB with the OSR.
With regards to validation, the objective of the GSGB pilot was to validate the pilot findings against the previous Health Survey for England (HSE) and the Commission’s quarterly telephone survey to help understand the impact of the methodology change and to inform our decision about whether to move to the experimental stage or not. The pilot report can be found in our Participation and Prevalence: Pilot methodology review.
In the GSGB Annual Report (2023) the Commission published data for the first time in relation to suicidal ideation or attempts and whether this was related to their gambling. Given this was the first time we had published data like this, it was important for us to validate them against another source. In the annual report we refer to the estimates being higher than those collected by the APMS 2014 and explain to users why there are likely to be differences in the findings. There will be another opportunity to validate the GSGB against the next set of APMS data published June 2025.
As highlighted by OSR, the Commission has also worked with the Bingo Association to design a question in the GSGB to understand where people play Bingo to help us validate GSGB data against Bingo Association industry data. The question was added to the GSGB in Wave 1, 2025 and data for this wave will be published in October 2025. For validation purposes, we also added another question to the GSGB in Wave 1, 2025 to ask if respondents have registered themselves with GamStop, the national self-exclusion scheme. The results from the question in GSGB will be validated against data on the number of people contacting the helpline.
We will update the GSGB technical report to include a section on data validation by October 2025.
Supporting appropriate use
To support appropriate interpretation and use of the GSGB data, the OSR recommends that the Gambling Commission should:
clearly communicate to users within the statistical releases the potential biases that may affect the GSGB estimates, the possible impact of these and Professor Sturgis’ conclusion regarding the risk that the statistics potentially overestimate some gambling behaviours.
Explain what the statistics can and can’t be used for, and why.
Ensure that the guidance on how to use the statistics is easy to find and tailored to different users, such as the media.
Guidance on using statistics from the GSGB was published alongside the first annual report. This guidance was published because the statistics from the GSGB were new and collected using a different survey methodology and we wanted to help anyone who wishes to use data from the GSGB to ensure it is reported correctly.
While in many cases the data from the GSGB has been used accurately by researchers, media outlets and other stakeholders, we have monitored data use (according to Principle T2.5 of the Code of Practice for Statistics (opens in new tab)) and noticed some common mistakes. In some instances, advice was given to the authors on the correct use of statistics, while in other cases corrections were requested. In the interest of being open and transparent, the full log of these requests can be found on our Using our official statistics page together with information on what we consider when we make a decision whether to request corrections. This was published for the first time in Apil 2025 and will be updated quarterly. In addition, since publishing the GSGB annual report in July 2024, the Commission has received a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests about how GSGB data is being used and the corrections we have requested. The outcomes of these FOI requests are publicly available and can be viewed on our full register of Freedom of Information Requests.
The OSR assessment noted mixed feedback in relation to the published guidance. Whilst some users found the guidance to be clear, other users felt that the documentation lacked clarity and that the number of caveats undermined their confidence in the data. Based on earlier feedback we received from the OSR, we updated the GSGB guidance in February 2025 to include more examples of how the statistics can and can’t be used and why. We also provided a dedicated email address statistics@gamblingcommission.gov.uk if users want to get in touch with us about how to use and communicate our statistics, or if they want to report incidences of data misrepresentation to us. Given the number of reports of misrepresentation to us by some stakeholders, we also published some clearer information on the criteria we use when considering if our official statistics have been used incorrectly.
To make it easier for users to find the guidance about using the GSGB statistics, we will add links to the guidance from our statistical landing pages and also from the excel data tables. We did this for the GSGB Year 2 (2024) Wave 4 data published on 22 May 2025 and will do this as standard going forward now.
Following the completion of the experimental research outlined in Recommendation 1, the project team at the National Centre for Social Research and the London School of Economics will review the guidance again and will update as required. Any proposed changes to the guidance will be shared with the GSGB Statistics User group.
Within our statistical releases we will also make it clearer to users that the GSGB produces estimates and these estimates are subject to potential biases. We will set out the impact of these potential biases, including the risk that some of the estimates about the negative consequences of gambling may be over estimated. We have delayed the publication of the GSGB Annual Report 2024 to allow time for the experimental research actioning Professor Sturgis’s recommendations to be completed, so we can be clearer about the impact of these potential biases.
Coherence and comparability
The OSR recommends to support user understanding of the GSGB’s role in the broader gambling data landscape, the Gambling Commission should do more to investigate the coherence and comparability of GSGB statistics with other relevant data, such as from the Health Survey for England and the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey that will be published later in 2025, and communicate these findings to users.
The guidance we published alongside the GSGB contains a section on comparability with previous surveys. Whilst we have advised against making direct comparisons between the GSGB and previous survey results due to significant methodological differences we understand that some limited comparisons are useful to assess differences between study methodologies. We included a table in our guidance which compares the collection mode, questionnaire content, age coverage, sample size, response rate and geographic coverage of GSGB compared to the Health Survey for England and the Commission’s previous telephone survey. We also updated our guidance in February to include an example of how users could refer to previous estimates without making a direct comparison, the wording we suggested is “The Gambling Survey for Great Britain estimates that 2.5 percent of adults have a PGSI score of 8 or more. This is higher than estimates produced by other studies which use different methodologies.”
The publication of the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS) in June 2025 and the 2024 Health Survey for England at the end of 2025 will provide further opportunities to investigate the coherence and comparability of GSGB Statistics with other relevant data, as will the experimental research currently being undertaken to implement the recommendations from Professor Sturgis’s report. We have also closely followed the work by ESRI in Ireland and the paper they published on measures of problem gambling, gambling behaviours and perceptions of gambling in Ireland (opens in new tab) and the work published by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency on the prevalence of gambling in Northern Ireland 2024 (opens in new tab) which both show a similar PGSI 8 or more score to the GSGB. The study undertaken by ESRI in Ireland uses an online methodology, but the study undertaken in Northern Ireland uses a face to face approach. The PGSI 8 or more score in each of these studies is 3.3 percent and 3.0 percent respectively. On an international basis, we are interested in the findings of a mixed mode population survey undertaken in Germany. A change in methodology from a telephone survey to a mixed online and telephone approach, also saw an increase in the percentage of the population in Germany identified as having a gambling disorder to 2.4 percent, as measured by the DSM-5.
At the Commission’s spring conference in March 2025, which over 200 stakeholders attended, we delivered a presentation on the triangulation of data from different sources to help understand the gambling landscape. This included data from the GSGB, open banking data and an industry pilot data set demonstrating how we integrate data from different sources to build the bigger picture.
The OSR assessment referred to a broader piece of work we are undertaking to identify and address evidence gaps and priorities in the gambling sector and encouraged publication of these findings. Our new evidence roadmaps framework is scheduled to be published in September 2025 together with our research governance framework.
Engagement and communication
The OSR’s fifth recommendation outlines that to ensure that user needs are sought, documented and considered, the Gambling Commission should create and implement a GSGB user engagement strategy. This strategy should detail specific activities and how users will be involved at various stages of the survey’s future developments.
We carried out a range of user engagement to develop the GSGB, including a formal consultation, establishing 3 stakeholder engagement groups, hosting webinars, workshops and presenting at the Commission’s evidence conferences to gather user opinions and feedback. Now that the GSGB has moved to the official statistics phase, we have transitioned our stakeholder engagement groups into the GSGB Statistics User Group. We have already started to promote the user group to stakeholders and for those interested in joining a link is available on our website.
The GSGB Statistics User Group has been created to enhance communication and engagement with users of the GSGB. It aims to:
- provide a forum for the exchange of views, ideas and information between users of the data and the Gambling Commission
- share research findings from analysis undertaken using the GSGB, either by the Commission or users of the data
- help inform the continued improvement and development of the GSGB.
We will use the first meeting of the user group to understand topics of interest for our users, so we can plan future activities.
We have also published a user engagement statement, which is relevant to all of our official statistics including the GSGB.
Under the same theme of user engagement, the OSR also recommends the Gambling Commission should remain open to receiving challenge, provide feedback to users on their contributions and clearly communicate what can and cannot be addressed in the development of the GSGB statistics.
As mentioned in Recommendation 5, we are establishing a GSGB statistics user group to provide a forum for the exchange of views, ideas and information between users of the GSGB data and the Gambling Commission.
We have also developed a GSGB feedback form for users to provide ongoing feedback on the GSGB. This could include feedback on the technical report, our statistical outputs, the guidance or the data that is available through our Power Bi dashboard. We will regularly review this and feedback to users via the user group meetings on the ideas that have been suggested and what we can and cannot address via GSGB.
Based on OSR feedback, we also established a dedicated email address statistics@gamblingcommission.gov.uk for the GSGB which users can use to contact us about the survey, advice on how to present the statistics or to report any incidences of misuse of GSGB data. In relation to this last point, we now also publish on a quarterly basis our log of requested corrections to our official statistics. One of the reasons for publishing this information is to help users understand how our statistics can and can’t be used.
With regards to stakeholder engagement the OSR also recommends the Gambling Commission should broaden its stakeholder network and collaborate further with official statistics producers.
The Commission has a broad range of stakeholders including industry, central and local government, academics, third sector, public health, regulators and we carry out a wide range of engagement. We host an annual spring conference which around 200 stakeholders attend from a range of backgrounds, we regularly meet with industry representatives, government departments and other regulators and we have an international programme of collaboration with gambling regulators in other jurisdictions.
Our Research and Statistics team attend quarterly meetings with other official statistics producers, organised by Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to share best practice and during the development of GSGB we reached out to other official statistics producers who had also introduced similar changes in survey methodologies to learn from their experiences. We also have established links with the research teams at Ofcom and the Money and Pensions Service who we meet with regularly.
On a quarterly basis we meet with representatives from the Scottish Government and Public Health Scotland to share our research. Whilst we don’t have a regular meeting established to talk about our research with representatives from the Welsh government, we have spoken to them about the changes they are introducing to the National Survey for Wales and shared our experience about changing the methodology for a population based survey. For the GSGB Annual Report 2023, we added colleagues in Scottish and Welsh government to our pre-release access list for the GSGB annual report following feedback that they would like to be included.
We will continue to broaden our stakeholder network in relation to GSGB, taking opportunities to present findings from the research at relevant conferences and meetings, developing our GSGB hub on our website and encouraging stakeholders to join our GSGB Statistics User Group.
With regards to communication, the OSR recommended to improve the effectiveness of its communication, the Gambling Commission should publish a communication strategy detailing how it will approach sharing GSGB updates with users and stakeholders, taking user preferences into account where possible.
The Communications plan for GSGB leading up to the launch of the annual report in July 2024 included the following:
- stakeholder engagement panels convened for Industry, Policy & Academics and Lived experience with regular sessions held to provide updates on the development of GSGB and gain feedback from stakeholders
- the Commission’s Spring Conference March 2023 and March 2024 included dedicated sessions covering GSGB
- user engagement and research to inform the design, content and language of the GSGB hub on the Commission website
- webinar to launch Annual Report. 207 stakeholders attended the webinar including representatives from industry, academia, third sector and policy makers
- official statistic publications accompanied by a blog post as user research suggested that many users accessed the data release via the blog
- speaking engagements with speeches delivered by senior executives at various conferences and events attended by industry, other regulators and government
- social media, the primary channel for GSGB content has been LinkedIn.
Our communications strategy for the ongoing publication of statistics from GSGB and related updates aims to:
- expand our proactive approach to communicating about GSGB to all stakeholder groups
- build on GSGB being the official statistics on gambling participation and prevalence in Great Britain by strengthening the recognition of them across stakeholder groups
- continue to build trust, address concerns and overcome any misconceptions about GSGB
- maximise reach of the Commission’s messaging around GSGB by using various communications channels (digital, traditional and other new channels), tailoring messages and strategies to resonate with different stakeholder groups and address specific interests and concerns
- showcase GSGB reports and insights within the wider ecosystem of data and insights which the GC draws upon to inform its work.
We will continue to use a variety of communication methods including webinars, podcasts, the Commission’s e-bulletin newsletter (fortnightly) and our annual spring conference to share information with users about the GSGB. The GSGB statistics user group will also form a key part of our user engagement and communications strategies.
Accessibility and usability
The OSR recommended to enhance the usability and accessibility of GSGB outputs, the Gambling Commission should consider how it can align further development of these statistics, including the detail that is provided and how it is presented, with user needs.
In line with principles T3 (Orderly release) (opens in new tab), T6 (Data Governance) (opens in new tab), V1(Relevance to Users) (opens in new tab), V2 (Accessibility) (opens in new tab) and V3 (Clarity and Insight) (opens in new tab), GSGB data is presented on our website in different formats including an interactive PowerBi dashboard.
We will continue to publish data from the GSGB in a variety of formats including reports, data tables and in Power Bi. We have also published the data to the UK Data Service, so it is accessible to other researchers to analyse. In the first month of being available, the dataset was downloaded nearly 50 times. We will also investigate adding a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) as an identifier to our reports to enable permanent and reliable accessibility even if their location (URL) changes
Following OSR’s recommendation, we will incorporate hyperlinks from the contents page in our published data tables to the relevant table of data, this will be implemented from October 2025.
In terms of developing the Power Bi dashboard and adding more content to it as suggested by some of our stakeholders, we will do this as part of the publication of the Year 2 GSGB data, due for publication on the 2 October 2025. We intend to ask our statistics user group for feedback in relation to the development of the Power Bi dashboard, asking them for ideas around the additional content they would like to see.
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Last updated: 24 July 2025
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