The battle for the gambling levy millions

Last month the gambling journalist Zak Thomas-Akoo revealed that the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has been changing the terms of its grant applications under pressure from anti-gambling academics and campaigners. 

Thanks to the mandatory gambling industry level, the UKRI has £10 million to distribute to anyone who wants to research "gambling and gambling-related harm". It's a huge amount of money for a niche academic area and "public health" researchers are fighting like rats in a sack to get hold of it. This is why people who have never written about gambling before have suddenly taken an interest in the topic. A slew of articles about why gambling should be treated as a "public health" issue have appeared in medical journals in the last couple of years, all of which have been characterised by ignorance about problem gambling as a psychological disorder and robotic incantations about treating it like tobacco (this is a particularly comic example). 

The UKRI doesn't give researchers much of a steer on what kind of research it wants or which specific areas it thinks need studying, but it does make some stipulations. When it created its webpage to attract researchers in June 2025, it originally said:

 

Applications must be consortia based and must bring together diverse people, institutions, expertise, experiences, places, and wider stakeholders. This includes people with lived and learned experience from gambling and gambling related harms.

By lived experience, we mean people with direct experience of gambling related harms. Partnerships with non-HEI [higher education institution] organisations and people across the third sector, community groups, industry, and the public sector are essential.

 

If you're a regular reader, you can probably guess which word triggered "public health" academics. Industry. It is one of the ten commandments of "public health" that industry does not get a seat at the table, and yet here was the UKRI saying that partnerships with industry are essential.

 

If researchers want data on how people gamble and how the sector is evolving, some co-operation with industry is clearly necessary, but the UKRI was flooded with complaints from moral busybodies. According to Thomas-Akoo, the webpage was changed three days later "to define industry far more broadly than was previously implied, meaning “any enterprise that places goods or services on a market and whose commercial activities constitute more than 20% of its annual operations.”" This means that researchers can form partnerships with all sorts of pressure groups, non-profit organisations and charities that are not part of the gambling industry and may be extremely anti-gambling. But they could do that anyway, so it seemed odd that the UKRI felt the need to change the small print like this. It looks like they were trying to appease to anti-gambling lobby, which is never easy.

 

In September, Private Eye (which repeats anything the anti-gambling coalition tells it) reported that "a group of gambling reform campaigners" had written to Peter Kyle - who was the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology until recently - to moan about the UKRI being insufficiently ideological. The UKRI had even had the nerve to talk about "individual risk factors" for problem gambling! For shame!

 

I have now seen some of these letters (released under FOI). What they reveal above all is a sense of entitlement. The activists and academics simply assume that the only way to look at gambling is as a tobacco-adjacent commercial determinant of health and that the only suitable framework is the relatively novel, untested and ill-defined "public health" approach to "gambling harm". 

 

A letter from some unnamed academics is a case in point. They assert that the very idea of gambling "harm" being a "product of individual vulnerabilities" has been "discredited" and that because OHID and the NHS "follow a public health approach to preventing gambling harm", everybody else should do the same. 

 

OHID and the NHS are, of course, health agencies so it is hardly surprising that they have endorsed the "public health" approach, but that doesn't justify ignoring decades of research showing that problem gambling is a complex psychological disorder that is often associated with other psychological disorders and can be treated by psychologists (which is what the NHS gambling clinics actually do). The UKRI doesn't need to spend £10 million a year for a bunch of nanny state blowhards to produce "research" which concludes that gambling advertising should be banned and gamblers should be given deposit limits (which is what they mean by "upstream prevention" and "plugging policy gaps"). These people are so predictable that their studies write themselves, but they do not extend the field of human knowledge.

 

The fact is that the "public health framing" is just one way to look at the issue and not a very fruitful one. When they talk about "the structural drivers of harm at a population level", they mean the legal gambling industry. It has always been odds on that the levy money would be used by activist-academics to provide a scientific fig leaf for bone-headed prohibitions that have already been decided upon. This is Year Zero for them and it is why they want any academic who is "linked to industry" excluded. Gambling research has traditionally been funded by industry, albeit usually through arm's length bodies like GambleAware. If the academics who have done gambling research in the past - most of which is more serious and nuanced than the junk that will be produced from now on - are "excluded from bidding for funds", the new wave of ideologues can start with a clean slate. It's not about conflicts of interest, it's about getting rid of the old guard.

 

 

Who will decide who the "industry actors and their intermediaries" are? They will, of course, and over time the scope will be expanded to the point where anyone who disagrees with them becomes "industry" by definition (as had happened with smoking and vaping). 

 

The APPG on Gambling Harm wrote a letter along similar lines and using the same buzzwords. Like the academics, they assert that there is only one way to look at gambling and that is by embracing the "public health approach".
 

A common rhetorical trick used by anti-gambling campaigners these days is to portray the traditional approach of focusing on individuals as "stigmatising" while at the same time stigmatising gambling and demonising gambling companies. A typical example of this is in the APPG letter.

 

These groups are essentially trying to bully the UKRI into excluding anyone who disagrees with them by pretending that the "public health approach" is the only game in town and that treating gambling disorder as a problem for individuals is socially unacceptable.

 

The letter from Peers for Gambling Reform is more or less a carbon copy of the APPG's letter. It complains that the UKRI has "overlooked ... commercial practices and products". This is only true insofar as the UKRI doesn't specify any particular research agenda or framework, i.e. it "overlooks" everything and researchers can propose any research project they like. What really bugs their lordships is that the UKRI hasn't focused obsessively on specific games and commercial practices which supposedly have specific risks attached to them.

 

Gambling With Lives wrote a similar letter and I daresay several other people did too. This is the "swarm effect". If they repeat something often enough, they think it will become an established fact.

 

The response of the UKRI was to change its webpage again by adding a whole load of provisos and caveats. Below the passages I quoted at the top of this post, it has now added the following (emphasis mine) 

 

Partnerships with non-HEI organisations and people across the third sector, community groups, the public sector, and industry are essential and can contribute to diverse, innovative and cutting edge research, particularly in respect of the provision of industry data and commercial insights for the furtherance of research endeavours. By ‘industry’ we mean any enterprise that places goods or services on a market and whose commercial activities constitute more than 20% of its annual operations. This definition applies across all sectors and is not limited to organisations within the gambling industry. However, we absolutely recognise the sensitivities in respect of partnerships or collaboration with businesses, the gambling industry or otherwise.

That is why we are clear that any engagement with industry partners, especially those from the gambling sector, must be demonstrably independent, evidence-based, research-led, and aligned with the programme’s public interest objectives to further understanding of gambling and gambling-related harm.

Further, all proposals will be subject to robust scrutiny through our peer review and governance processes, with particular attention paid to the independence and integrity of the research, the source and independence of the findings, and the potential for real-world impact in understanding gambling behaviour and reducing gambling harms.

UKRI wishes to clarify that, as well as not being permitted to host awards, under the Research Programme on Gambling UKRI does not permit funding to be provided to Gambling Commission licence holders who are subject to the levy. We have also placed restrictions on co-funding from such organisations. Furthermore, UKRI would not expect individual researchers to concurrently hold funding from licence holders subject to the levy while receiving funding from the Research Programme on Gambling.

UKRI does not permit engagement with industries whose core business can be associated with harm to public health or societal wellbeing, in line with our ethical standards and harms-based exclusion principles.

Exceptions may be made for time-limited, purpose-specific interactions deemed essential to achieving legitimate and high-quality research objectives (for example, access to proprietary datasets or materials), provided that:

• there is no direct funding or co-authorship from the excluded entity
• the interaction is subject to robust ethical review and declared transparently
• appropriate safeguards are in place to prevent undue influence, reputational risk, or conflicts of interest
• the public benefit of the research demonstrably outweighs the risks of engagement

... Partnerships can take different forms including project partners or collaborating organisations. You must demonstrate how the partnerships within your consortium are equitable, have contributed to the development of your application including its conceptualisation, are not compromised by non-compliance with our conflict of interest policy, and will help the centre achieve its aims.

 

It's difficult to know how this will work in practice. On the face of it, it is incoherent. On the one hand, the UKRI is encouraging researchers to form partnerships with the gambling industry and it still says that whoever runs the Gambling Harms Research Coordination Centre should "ensure that the Centre includes representation from industry." On the other hand, it says that it "does not permit engagement with industries whose core business can be associated with harm to public health or societal wellbeing". But harm to public health and societal wellbeing is exactly what "public health" academics think the gambling industry is all about and since the UKRI is giving grants for people to study gambling "harm", it would seem that the UKRI thinks the same. 

 

The whole webpage is now a bit of a muddle, but since the UKRI keeps changing it every time they get an indignant letter from a wowser, that is hardly surprising.