The Office for Statistics Regulation – the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority – 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…
Brown and his allies have spent the run up to the budget campaigning 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. That’s your nan’s online bingo gone…
Brown’s justification for this is an Office for Health Improvement and Disparities report from January 2023 which he and others have misquoted by saying gambling’s “most addictive practices are responsible for social harm that costs the NHS and other public services more than £1 billion a year.” A sobering stat, if it were actually true…
OHID counted costs ‘associated’ with ‘problem gambling’ rather than attributed to it. The OSR says “this distinction does not appear to have been clearly understood by some users of the data.” 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…
According to correspondence released under FOI the statistics regulator said in light of the repeated misuse of figures “we have asked OHID to consider how this differentiation could be made more explicit in their publication to help guard against further misinterpretation or misuse.” In a letter to the original report authors at OHID the regulator wrote:
“We 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.”
A big old banner for the Gordons out there…
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