Most recently, the UK’s Gambling Commission provided a detailed review of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain. In its statement, the gaming regulator also offered a reply to the Office for Statistics Regulation’s assessment of that same survey.
The paper studies GSGB’s first year as the official source of gambling behaviour data and discusses the commission’s objective to improve it and make it more reliable.
Statement from the Commission
“The first year of the GSGB has been a critical learning phase. We are committed to continuous improvement, and our response to the OSR’s recommendations shows our determination to build trust, support accurate data use, and ensure the GSGB meets the needs of all users,” said Ben Haden, Director of Research and Statistics at GC.
The GSGB was started in July 2023 and released its first annual report in July 2024. It’s currently considered the biggest survey of gambling involvement and prevalence across the globe.
It collects data from more than 20,000 adults every year, which gives important information about how and why people gamble, including their activity on online casinos. It also studies possible damages they face and new trends in gambling behaviour.
How to Trust Official Gambling Statistics
The OSR's independent report was released in May 2025 and praised the gambling regulator for its major achievements in designing and putting the GSGB into action. It applauded the commission for being open and committed to improving, as well as for getting professional methodological guidance from Professor Patrick Sturgis.
On the other hand, the OSR also found things that needed improvement, namely, how to communicate uncertainty, how to help users, and how to make sure the data is used correctly.
In response, the commission has started a program to make things better in several ways. This includes:
- Experimental Research Programme: Run by independent researchers from the National Centre for Social Research and experts from the London School of Economics. They are doing experimental investigations to follow up on important methodological suggestions from Professor Sturgis's review. More information will be published in August 2025.
- Better Quality Assurance: This summer, a new research governance framework will be released, and the GSGB technical report will be updated to make the processes for data validation and quality assurance clearer.
- Clearer Communication of Limitations: Future statistics releases will make it clearer that some GSGB estimates may make gambling damages seem worse than they really are.
This ties into broader efforts around responsible gaming and the accurate interpretation of harm-related data by the media and policymakers.
Widespread Use and Stakeholder Engagement
The GSGB has been very popular since it launched. More than 5,200 people accessed GSGB content on the GC's website between February 2024 and March 2025. More than 1,500 of them did so for the first time. Most of the users are from the UK, but the study also got responses from people in Ireland, the US, Canada, and Germany.
In addition to that, the survey has been used in research on policy, public health, and academia, as well as in discussions in Parliament. It was used in the NICE Guideline on gambling risks that came out in January 2025, was a big part of publications from the University of Bristol and the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, and was brought up during the February 2025 parliamentary debate on gaming-related problems.
To encourage correct understanding and appropriate use of its statistics, the commission has been keeping an eye on how the public and politicians use GSGB data.
Still, the regulator attempted to fix mistakes and make things clearer when they happened, such as when wrong extrapolations were made during legislative discussions. There is a public log of requested changes that is updated every three months.
Continued Development and Transparency
The UK’s gaming watchdog has made it clear that the GSGB is still being worked on. The 2025 survey waves already feature new questions about consumer trust, unlicensed gambling, Bingo participation, and using self-exclusion technologies like GamStop.
These changes were made because users asked for them and because the Bingo Association and other important groups worked together.
You can get data from the GSGB in a number of ways, such as downloadable reports, interactive dashboards, and raw datasets that are hosted on the UK Data Service. Researchers from outside the company have downloaded the dataset about 50 times since it was made available in February 2025.
To keep getting feedback, the commission has set up a GSGB Statistics User Group that meets regularly and a special email address ([email protected]) for users to send questions and comments.
Future Plans and Strategic Outlook
In the next few months, the UKGC will compare the GSGB results to those of other big UK studies, such as the 2024 Health Survey for England and the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, which came out in June 2025. These initiatives are meant to further check how consistent and comparable gambling-related data are across different sources.
The commission will also release its new “Evidence Roadmap” in September 2025. This document explains how the GSGB and other datasets will be utilised to fill up gaps in evidence and help with data-informed regulation. This fits with the gambling watchdog’s strategic goal for 2024–2027, which aims to improve gambling regulation by using better evidence.
The GSGB is a big change in how people think about gambling in Great Britain at its core. The commission wants to make sure that the GSGB stays a reliable and authoritative source of information on gaming involvement and harm by being open, following strict methods, and being responsive to stakeholders.
