No rise in problem gambling - official

Much of the moral panic about gambling in recent years has centred on the claim that the number of problem gamblers has "increased by 50% in three years", leaving the UK with 450,000 gambling addicts.

These were always very dicey statistics, as I explained in an IEA report last year...

Three editions of the British Gambling Prevalence Survey (BGPS), published in 1999, 2007 and 2010, provide the most comprehensive overview of gambling and problem gambling in the UK, but the Gambling Commission has since withdrawn funding for these reports. This is unfortunate, not only because future estimates may not be directly comparable, but because the 2010 edition of the report was something of a cliff-hanger. It found a statistically significant increase in problem gambling between 2007 and 2010 using one methodology but not another. As the DMCS notes:

“The proportions increased from 0.5% of the adult population in 2007 to 0.7% in 2010 (which is not statistically significant) on one measure and from 0.6% in 2007 to 0.9% in 2010 (which is at the margins of statistical significance) on the other measure used.” (DCMS, 2013: 29)

[This refers to two different methodologies which produce slightly different results: the DSM-IV test and the PGSI test.] As an illustration of how different these surveys are, only 0.5 per cent of the population qualify as problem gamblers under both methodologies. Because problem gambling is relatively rare, national surveys are sensitive to small changes in the sample group. Even in the survey which found an increase in problem gambling, only 64 out of the 7,756 respondents were classed as problem gamblers and the authors of the BGPS report urged that “caution should be taken when interpreting this result.” (BGPS, 2010: 85). Unsurprisingly, however, campaigners focus solely on the positive finding and proceed to make post hoc ergo propter hoc assumptions about the cause of this putative rise in problem gambling. Rowenna Davis, for example, wrote in the Daily Mail: “According to a Gambling Association [sic] survey, problem gambling has increased 50 per cent since liberalisation was introduced in 2005.” Similarly, an anonymous source told the BBC’s Panorama programme: “After FOBT machines were introduced to betting shops, the number of problem gamblers mushroomed” (Panorama, 2012).

In fact, the only conclusion drawn with any confidence in the last British Gambling Prevalence Survey was that there were between 254,900 and 593,400 problem gamblers in the UK in 2010. There is a wide gap between the low and high ends of this estimate and it is uncertain whether the true figure has risen since 2007, let alone whether it has risen since 2010.

Responsibility for collecting problem gambling data has since been passed to public health authorities (because everything is a 'public health issue' now, obviously). Moreover, they are collected separately for England, Scotland and Wales. I mentioned last year that the Scottish data showed no rise in problem gambling between 2010 and 2012. Now we have the English data. Better still, we have the English and Scottish data combined in this report.

The results suggest that there are far fewer than 450,000 problem gamblers in Britain and strongly suggest that there has not been a rise in problem gambling since 1999.

Under the DSM-IV measure, problem gambling prevalence is estimated to be 0.5 per cent. Under the PGSI measure, it is estimated to be 0.4 per cent. This compares to 0.9 per cent and 0.6 per cent in the 2010 British Gambling Prevalence Survey.

For some reason, the new report doesn't give confidence intervals, but if we compare the mid-point estimates from the four surveys, this is the trend under the DSM methodology for England and Scotland:

1999: 0.6%

2007: 0.6%

2010: 0.9%

2012: 0.5% 

And this is how it looks under the PGSI methodology (which wasn't used in the 1999 report):

2007: 0.6%

2010: 0.7%

2012: 0.4%

A few caveats need to be mentioned. Firstly, the latest survey doesn't include Wales and so the authors remove Wales from previous surveys in order to make comparisons. This makes no difference except to the PGSI figure for 2010 which moves from 0.6 per cent to 0.7 per cent.

Secondly, as mentioned, we don't have the confidence intervals. Confidence intervals tend to be quite wide in these studies. The mid-point estimates can act as a guide but should not be taken to be precise figures. There could be some changes going on below the limit of detection. However, there is nothing in the data to imply that problem gambling rates are higher now than in 1999. Indeed, if we were as literal-minded as the anti-gambling campaigners and looked only at the mid-point estimates, we would conclude that there has been a decline.

Thirdly, the most recent survey was carried out by a different organisation to that which carried out the previous three. Although the authors say comparisons should be "made with caution" as a result, they assure us that "the methods and questions used in each survey were the same" and they conclude that "problem gambling rates in Britain appear to be relatively stable" (ie. since 1999).

In short, the idea that problem gambling has increased in the last decade—let alone increased by 50 per cent—is looking weaker than ever. Like so many anti-gambling arguments, it seems to be a convenient myth.