Academia in a Spin
Research-as-advocacy and the subversion of the Gambling Act Review
Advocacy research is skewing the evidence informing the government’s review of gambling laws – restricting personal freedoms and further undermining an already highly regulated industry, writes Dan Waugh.
When Nigel Huddleston launched the government’s once-in-a-generation review of Britain’s gambling laws in 2019, he emphasised that it was to be an exercise in modernisation, grounded in hard evidence. After 27 months, three gambling ministers and four Secretaries of State, publication of a White Paper is now understood to be imminent; but there are also signs that the process has worked loose of Huddleston’s sensible moorings. In particular, the abasement of academia as a tool of advocacy rather than enquiry now presents a strong risk that this long awaited and long overdue review will result in regulatory dysfunction.
An analysis of Hansard reveals that the most commonly cited pieces of research in Parliamentary Questions on gambling since the launch of the Gambling Act Review are last year’s Public Health England report on gambling harms and the 2021 Oxford University study of Lloyds Bank data on gambling expenditures (Muggleton et al.). It is not surprising that these two reports have grabbed political attention. The former alleged social and economic costs of gambling in England of at least £1.2billion a year; while the latter claimed to have identified relationships between spending on gambling and a range of ‘harms’, including increased mortality. However, both studies contained serious methodological flaws; both made immoderate and unsubstantiated claims; both appeared to have been conducted with the aim of influencing the outcome of the government review. As we have seen only too well in recent years, ‘science’ can all too easily be bent to the will of vested or ideological interests.
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