travel we used to see in Britain, which was around protection and tolerance. We now seem to have come adrift from that. Elsewhere, I think there are markets in the world where there's too little focus on consumer protection where you can see the backlash coming from some distance off.
At the end of the day what we have to remember is that we all have our personal views about this activity. None of us are right, these are just personal views and any government can choose to regulate the market, or even ban the market, in what it perceives to be the best interest of the state. As long as they're very clear about that, as long as governments say this is our policy on gambling, and therefore this is what we're going to do, it's their prerogative. I think where we get unnecessary confusion is where the stated policy and the actual legislation/regulation are out of sync, that's where you get dissonance and I think that's what we're seeing at the moment.
Te stated principles underpinning our legislation are about protection and tolerance and the rights of recreational consumer. However, I think this is now largely overridden by public health concerns with the UK Gambling Commission showing very little interest in the rights of recreational consumers.
How much do you rely on data and statistics in this panel debate? How much of it is actually useful in terms of the data and how much you think is anecdotal as regards gambling prohibition?
We have to bring research into the discussion. Research forms a large component of what we consider to be the evidence base, which determines the policies themselves. What we've seen, not just in Britain, is that academia has become politicised in the last 10 years, which has affected how institutions operate. Te concern I have is that an awful lot of current research is dishonest. It is agenda driven. So while we can learn from research, protecting consumers and pursuing their wellbeing in this space now relies on us understanding the data.
In many cases research has crossed the line into activism, which is not robust, but is held as permissible. It’s permissible to pursue methodology that misrepresents because there's an overlay that it’s leading to better protections for consumers. My view is that if have poor research and poor evidence, the result is poor policy and a consumer that’s hit hardest.
Returning to the incoming UK Gambling Act. Do you think, from what you've seen thus far, is anything in your view a win for the prohibitionists in terms of restrictions?
Probably the most potentially significant element of the Gambling Act review in that sense, is the creation of a new levy. Te proposed new tax would fund services for the treatment of gambling disorders, with the provision for prevention services and, critically, for research. So, starting next year there'll be a huge amount of funding available for research.
P62 WIRE / PULSE / INSIGHT / REPORTS
My concern, which is the concern of a lot of people, is that research funding will be misused. It will be allocated to those with a priori biases against gambling to propel successively greater restrictions, such as the ones mentioned in the panel summary, including banning the sale of alcohol in casinos (research funded by the state and published recently in the Lancet Public Health Journal). So, while we’re already seeing the misuse of research in order to promote an agenda via relatively modest funding, if we start to see several millions of pounds every year spent on research in the UK, then this misuse is going to become supercharged.
Unless there's clear governance around how the money is used, things could get very messy very quickly. We've seen, for example, the UK Gambling Commission dish out large sums of money, £90 million in the space of four years, for the purposes of treatment, research, and
harm prevention. A lot of that research has been commissioned in this way has been demonstrably of a very poor quality and there's been zero oversight by the Gambling Commission. Te extent to which funding delivers high-quality research has been of no interest to the commission to date, so it's really important we have strong governance around this fund in the future.
Are there are specific circumstances that create game bans? What are the triggers and other elements of de-escalation that you've seen in different markets?
What we see is a combination of things that precipitate bans, which includes macro factors, major events like economic hard times where governments tend to become more paternalistic about the well-being of their citizens. In Britain there’s been a push back against gambling over
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