Laura Balla, the Head of Research at the Gambling Commission, has spoken about the upcoming changes to the Gambling Survey for Great Britain.

The Gambling Survey for Great Britain is a new procedure that will replace the previous methodology to measure gambling-related harm in the UK.

Balla explained that the survey has been created alongside research that will broaden the understanding of gambling-related harm, rather than “to develop a headline score or psychometric scale of gambling harms.”

She also emphasised how the new Gambling Survey would be supported by the Wardle et al. (2018) research and framework.

Balla said: “What became clear during the development of the questions was that there were differences in the severity of some of the issues that were being considered.

“Going forward we will be treating items that are unquestionably more severe, such as bankruptcy, relationship breakdown and committing a crime, separately to what we are terming ‘other negative consequences.’

“The new findings will also be positioned in a separate chapter of the report covering the impact of gambling, to also include people’s motivations for and enjoyment of gambling.”

However, Gambling Insider Editor Tim Poole recently interviewed Melanie Ellis, Northridge Law Partner, regarding this issue.

Ellis said: “It looks like we’re going to have a very different measure of problem gambling rates coming out of that survey than we have out of the official set of statistics from the NHS Health Survey and the Commission’s own telephone surveys, which it did for a number of years.

“So it puts us in a bit of a difficult position in terms of evaluating the impact of changes.

Ellis went on to explain that the initial pilot studies had already shown different rates of problem gambling than previously verified sources.

As such, it will be difficult to know whether any changes in July will be due to a change in methodology, or whether they’re due to the responsible gambling measures put into force from the White Paper.