Report
Initial findings from new data on consumer trust – GSGB
Initial findings from new data on consumer trust – GSGB
Background
The Gambling Act 2005 (opens in new tab) sets out 3 licensing objectives that must be met by all licensed gambling operators, including “ensuring that gambling is conducted in a fair and open way.” The Gambling Commission carries out regulatory activity to ensure that:
- products and services provided by licensees are fair and deliver what they promise
- consumers are able to make informed choices about their gambling
- licensees ensure consumer issues are addressed fairly and promptly.
Success in achieving this can ultimately impact consumers’ trust in the gambling companies that they use. Consumer trust has therefore been a longstanding metric of interest to the Commission as a marker of the effectiveness of its regulatory work.
Historically, the Commission measured public trust in the gambling industry using a single question administered in its consumer surveys:
How far do you agree or disagree that, in this country, gambling is conducted fairly and can be trusted?
Responses were captured on a Likert scale from 1 to 5, where 1 was strongly disagree, and 5 was strongly agree.
This provided a quarterly trend, which was reported as levels of agreement versus disagreement and fed into the Commission’s impact metrics. These metrics are linked to regulatory outcomes in key areas, including fair and open gambling. Most recently, this measure has been captured through the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) on an annual basis.
However, the question has its limitations. As well as common limitations associated with self-report survey methodologies, the question itself was also very broad and responses susceptible to being driven by a range of factors outside of direct regulatory activity. Whilst the trend data were useful, they did not identify why levels of trust were where they were, or what factors were driving improvements or declines in the headline levels of agreement. The Commission was therefore limited in what we could do in response.
The Commission therefore developed a brief for a comprehensive, mixed-methodology research project to be undertaken through its Consumer Voice programme to qualitatively explore the drivers of consumer trust and identify the elements most important to gambling consumers. The main objective of the research was to develop a new, multi-statement question on consumer trust that could be added to the GSGB to replace the former single statement question. The research was delivered by Yonder in 2024, with further piloting and validation of the new question led by the Commission continuing throughout 2025. Full findings from the qualitative research were published in October 2024.
This report provides headline findings from the first full year of data (2025) and is accompanied by a detailed technical report outlining the development of the new survey question, and the piloting and validation exercise which resulted in some minor changes being made to the introduction of the survey question and some of the statements and response options. These changes have been made to the 2026 survey, and as such the findings in this report should be treated as ‘in development’ until the impact of these changes can be assessed in later waves of data.
The data collected via the GSGB was entirely quantitative. The quotes shared in this report were provided by respondents in the qualitative phase of the research, and have been included to provide supplementary depth to the findings.
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Initial findings from new data on consumer trust - Details and methodology
Last updated: 23 July 2026
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