BGC rejects Lords committee's evidence base for gambling ad ban call
The Betting and Gaming Council and consultant Dan Waugh dispute the data underpinning a House of Lords report urging ministers to ban gambling advertising, as iGaming Business reports.
A House of Lords Liaison Committee follow-up report published on 17 September has called on ministers to prohibit gambling advertising "as soon as practicable", according to iGaming Business. The committee also wants the government to drop its objective of growing the licensed betting sector and revert to a pre-2005 stance under which gambling is tolerated rather than marketed.
The committee's central claim is that there is "no evidence for the safety of gambling advertising", the outlet reports. Betting and Gaming Council chief executive Grainne Hurst has dismissed the findings as "a deeply misguided report which risks weakening, rather than strengthening, consumer protection", according to iGaming Business.
The report's starting figure, drawn from the Gambling Commission's Gambling Survey for Great Britain, puts problem gambling among between one million and 1.5 million adults, based on 2.4% of the population scoring eight or more on the Problem Gambling Severity Index. The same report notes that the NHS Health Survey for England recorded a rate of 0.7% in 2024, equivalent to roughly 350,000 people.
Dan Waugh of Regulus Partners told iGB that the GSGB has produced higher estimates than every other official source for close to two decades, spanning three NHS surveys and the commission's own telephone-based research. He attributes this to topic salience, the tendency of people already interested in gambling to be more willing to take part in a survey about it, telling iGB the method "over-recruits gamblers and more engaged gamblers".
Waugh noted the survey's response rate of 18–19%, below its 22% target, as a further weakness. He said academic Heather Wardle had flagged topic salience bias to the commission as the likely cause of over-reporting back in 2023, a warning that only came to light through a freedom of information request, according to iGB.
The Gambling Commission has defended the survey as having been "designed by experts, reviewed by experts and approved by experts", arguing respondents answer more honestly without an interviewer present. The committee's report cites LSE academic Patrick Sturgis as backing the approach, though his own 2024 review for the commission had urged caution over the risk of overstatement, iGB reports. The committee instead suggested that older surveys, including those behind its own 2020 report, "may indeed have been underestimated".
Waugh's assessment, relayed by iGB, is that the report "notes that concerns have been raised about the GSGB – but then largely proceeds on the basis that the GSGB is accurate".
On timing, the committee concluded that voluntary measures "have not gone far enough", despite the Premier League's removal of gambling sponsors from shirt fronts having only begun in August. The committee took oral evidence on 17 June, before any shirt had changed, and said it remained "not confident" in that measure, leaning on an academic estimate that it would cut visible gambling marketing by only around 9%. Waugh, who gave evidence to the inquiry, had told the committee that "I think 9% is still a meaningful reduction," a response iGB says was recorded in a single paragraph of the report.
The committee pointed to Manchester United's reported training kit arrangement with Betway as evidence that sponsorship is migrating rather than disappearing, and recommended that January's wagering cap and still-unevaluated opt-in rules for direct marketing be scrapped in favour of outright bans.
The deepest dispute concerns illegal betting. The industry's core argument against an advertising ban is that it would push consumers towards unlicensed operators, a claim the committee dismissed as "insufficiently evidenced". Hurst countered that "most concerning is the report's willingness to dismiss the rapidly growing threat from the criminal gambling market simply because it does not fit its conclusions", per iGB.
The committee's main counter-evidence, relayed via the UKRI Gambling Harms Research UK Evidence Centre, is a study by Philip Newall, Allegra Whybrow and Jamie Torrance involving interviews with "representatives of state monopoly operators across European jurisdictions", which the report says "consistently suggested that advertising restrictions did not lead to consumer migration towards illegal operators".
iGB notes the study was not designed to test that question: its authors spoke to 11 people in safer gambling roles across ten state-owned operators in 2024, seven of them European, on the subject of safer gambling practice rather than illegal markets. In a monopoly jurisdiction, the only alternative to the state brand is, by definition, an unlicensed one.
Europe's state monopolies are already shrinking, the outlet reports. Finland's Veikkaus has argued since 2022 that its own monopoly should be ended, after the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority estimated that around half of Finnish online gambling spend now sits outside the state channel. Veikkaus chief executive Olli Sarekoski told Lottery Daily that a lot of gaming is taking place outside official channels, according to iGB.