{"id":215457,"date":"2025-10-21T12:40:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T12:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/215457\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T12:40:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T12:40:07","slug":"gordon-browns-gambling-statistics-misuse-slammed-by-regulator-guido-fawkes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/215457\/","title":{"rendered":"Gordon Brown&#8217;s Gambling Statistics Misuse Slammed by Regulator \u2013 Guido Fawkes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Office for Statistics Regulation \u2013 the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority \u2013 has spent the last few months tackling flagrant misuse of statistics by Gordon Brown and a kabal of leftist think tanks in their campaign to destroy the gambling industry. As always a sisyphean task\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Brown and his allies have spent the run up to the budget <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2025\/aug\/06\/gambling-industry-profitable-tax-fight-child-poverty\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">campaigning<\/a> for a hike in gambling taxation. Namely more than doubling remote gaming duty, hiking the general betting duty on bookmakers from 15% to 25%, and doubling machine gaming duty.\u00a0That\u2019s your nan\u2019s online bingo gone\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Brown\u2019s justification for this is an Office for Health Improvement and Disparities report from January 2023 which he and others have misquoted by saying gambling\u2019s \u201cmost addictive practices are responsible for social harm that costs the NHS and other public services more than \u00a31 billion a year.\u201d A sobering stat, if it were actually true\u2026<\/p>\n<p>OHID counted costs \u2018associated\u2019 with \u2018problem gambling\u2019 rather than attributed to it. The OSR says \u201cthis distinction does not appear to have been clearly understood by some users of the data.\u201d It singles out subsequent reports by the leftist think tanks the IPPR and the Social Market Foundation for misusing the data in the same way\u2026<\/p>\n<p>According to correspondence <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ons.gov.uk\/aboutus\/transparencyandgovernance\/freedomofinformationfoi\/osrreviewintothesmfreportongamblingtaxreform\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">released<\/a> under FOI the statistics regulator said in light of the repeated misuse of figures \u201cwe have asked OHID to consider how this differentiation could be made more explicit in their publication to help guard against further misinterpretation or misuse.\u201d In a letter to the original report authors at OHID the regulator wrote:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\u201cWe appreciate that your report does state that the links between problem gambling behaviours and fiscal costs are associative and do not demonstrate causality. However, given that we continue to receive concerns about the use of these figures, we would strongly encourage you to consider actions that you could take to support the appropriate use of these figures. For example, one option might be to include a prominent disclaimer or banner on the publication itself to clarify this point and help prevent misinterpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A big old banner for the Gordons out there\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Office for Statistics Regulation \u2013 the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority \u2013 has spent the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[14525,92623,102,92624,1906,6623,92625,92626,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-215457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-gambling","9":"tag-gambling-tax","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-ippr","12":"tag-mental-health","13":"tag-mentalhealth","14":"tag-office-for-statistics-regulation","15":"tag-social-market-foundation","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}