Gambling Commission presents UK illegal gambling estimates challenged in report

The Gambling Commission, Great Britain's gambling regulator, presented new illegal gambling figures on 5 November. Sue Young, the Commission's executive director of operations, said in the press release that participation in the illegal market appears low and stable on these indicators. The report questions that description.

The index uses data from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, collected between April 2025 and April 2026. According to the report, this is the first full year of questions that were first tested in 2025, so there is no earlier year for comparison. The report says the Commission itself acknowledges that trends over time can only be tracked with future waves of data. The report adds that the word "stable" does not appear in any page of the Commission's report and is found only in the press release.

The only trend the Commission publishes is in its data dashboard, which measures the estimated time spent on identified illegal websites. On that measure, activity in September 2026 was 12% higher than the average of the previous three months and 11% lower than a year earlier. The technical report says indicators may be added, revised or removed, and that the score may be recalculated.

The regulator concludes that 0.6% of the population used an illegal website within the last four weeks, with another 0.4% doing so within the last twelve months. Only 3,569 people were asked the questions on illegal gambling. They were people who had gambled online during the past year, and those who play only the National Lottery were not counted. The result was then extended to 14,257 participants who answered over the internet. The report treats anyone who was not asked as showing no indications, and they are included in the 94.4% figure. People who answered the survey on paper were excluded.

The Commission's report says 4.6% of the population show "limited indications" of illegal website use, which it does not count as use. Among people who gamble online, the report says this group rises to 14.0%. The index detected 128 illegal-website users across the whole sample. The Commission itself admits it cannot break these users down by profile.

For 18-to-24-year-olds, the report text puts illegal website use at 1.5% over the year and 0.7% over the last four weeks. A chart in the report says the same as that text. The table beside that chart, however, says exactly the opposite. According to the report, the table has its rows swapped, and this applies to every age band, not just one. The reference group differs too: the report works out the 4% from people who gambled online in the previous twelve months, whereas the dashboard bases it on people who did so in the last four weeks.

The technical report, produced with the consultancy Yonder, says the index does not claim to be a definitive measure of the size and scope of the illegal gambling market. It describes the indicators as approximations rather than explicit proof. It also says players do not always know whether they have used an illegal website. It adds that their recall of what they did more than four weeks earlier is limited.

The report says none of this shows that the 1% figure is false. It argues that the Commission presented as low and stable a figure that its own documents treat with far more caution.