Over the past few years the UK’s Gambling Commission have been accused of being rather transparent – like that guy in the office who comes in once a week and when he’s there never does anything that you can see. This has changed in recent times though. Nowadays they’re even actively offering advice to anyone that will take it and even conducting studies into gambling habits. Imagine that!
The latest “comprehensive review” that they are in the process of undertaking involves gathering adult gambling prevalence data. The news is that they’re looking at stakeholders to give them views on a range of options for future data gathering. This is primarily to enable a better process and to provide better data about who gambles and on what in the future.
The Gambling Commission said that the consultation is about the methodology to be used in future, and is needed because:
• we want to see whether we can move to an approach that is more flexible and produces more regular outputs than afforded by the current three-yearly British Gambling Prevalence Survey (BGPS) whilst maintaining maximum comparability
• we want to be able to fully understand the costs and implications of different survey approaches.
The Commission also used the release to confirm that after the recent Government spending review, their grant in aid allocation has been removed. As a main source of funding for the collection of prevalence data, it may see the Commission return to its transparent ghost-like days.
