At a recent event at the ICE Totally Gaming conference, the Responsible Gambling Trust (RGT) released its annual report and outlined its plans for the coming year. It was a move which RGT Chief Executive Marc Etches hoped would deliver “greater transparency”, as previously the RGT had only handed their accounts over to the Charity Commission.
Mr. Etches said he perceives the RGT’s role as “brokering access for researchers to customers, data and venues”. However, the provision of access to researchers could have been written into the recently updated licensing conditions that apply to all gambling operators. This would negate the need for the industry to be involved with the commissioning body. But for all the talk of access, and
despite assurances from the Minister Helen Grant, the RGT failed to provide a live terminal for recent research into Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs).
The research itself asked the wrong questions. Instead of a focus on the product, specifically its features, content and environment, the research instead attempted to differentiate between problem gamblers and non-problem gamblers using machine data. At the event, Mr. Etches said: “Whatever the arguments about whether the research asked the right questions or the wrong questions, or whether it drew the right conclusions or the wrong conclusions, what was important was that it was open, trusting and collaborative.”
However, can the same be said of the commissioning process? The RGT and the bookmakers may well have worked collaboratively with organisations they could trust, such as FeatureSpace, but the tendering process was not open. Mr. Etches made reference to an open tendering process for forthcoming research into remote gambling, but serious questions have to be asked of the RGT’s approach to commissioning FeatureSpace, a company with a commercial interest in maintaining the £100 stake per spin on FOBTs.
Furthermore, Mark Knighton, the CSO of PlayScan – a world leader in harm minimisation software –
recently argued in a blog post that it is impossible to determine from data alone who problem gamblers are. If the RGT had put the research out to tender, they might have refined their questions having had input from a company with decades of experience in a field FeatureSpace is only beginning to understand.
The Campaign believes it is integral to the strategy of the RGT and the bookmakers to convince government that they can identify and minimise the harm to problem gamblers and that they can protect the vulnerable. FeatureSpace’s approach through predictive algorithms is another line of defence from FOBT stake reduction.
However, the reality is that FeatureSpace was unable to detect problem gamblers from the data with any degree of accuracy. As Professor Jim Orford noted in his summary of the RGT’s Harm Minimisation conference: “50% of problem gamblers could be identified but only at a cost of a false positive rate of 25% amongst non-problem gamblers. Since the latter are much the larger group, this represents an unacceptably high false-positive rate. In other words at even a modest level of sensitivity, specificity is unacceptably low.”
However, the more difficult part is determining how to effectively intervene, something the research did not address. PlayScan combines features such as highly developed pop-ups (which disable play until the player has answered a series of questions to determine whether they are a problem gambler), as well as a cap on overall daily and monthly losses. Norsk Tipping, a Norwegian state operator which uses PlayScan software, utilises a card-based system, meaning it is not possible for someone to lose more than the equivalent of around £40 a day, or £250 a month.
Nevertheless, the RGT permitted FeatureSpace a platform to claim that “reducing the stake on FOBTs was not a silver bullet” and therefore the answer was in the product that they are developing. Similarly, despite conclusions from Dr. Adrian Parke’s research suggesting high stakes do impair decision making ability, Dr. Parke subsequently stated in an interview with the trade press that it would be “overtly naïve and massively premature” to suggest reducing the maximum stake size would help reduce problem gambling. This was recently quoted by Lord Gardiner on behalf of the Government.
Reducing the maximum stake on FOBTs would help to reduce the harm the product causes, as it would limit losses and lead to the removal of the addictive casino content that does not belong on the high street. It would not eliminate problem gambling, but for the researchers to suggest that stake reduction is not an option for policymakers is absurd. It is neither within the remit of the researchers nor the RGT to make such non-evidence based inferences. By reflecting the views of the bookmakers, is it becoming clear who industry-funded researchers are accountable to? The politics should be left to the politicians, who are accountable to the public.