Last updated: August 14, 2024
The Betting and Gaming Council reported a successful Safer Gambling Week 2023, noting a substantial rise in responsible gambling tool adoption. Over 83,000 unique account holders set deposit limits, with a notable 300% increase in maximum stake limits. The BGC highlights the success of the campaign in encouraging safer gambling practices as Safer Gambling Week 2024 draws near.
Welcoming the results of the last year’s Safer Gambling Week, the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) in its turn stressed that the recent survey of the campaign revealed an increase in the consumption of the related instruments with the backdrop of the one-week dedicated to responsible betting.
All this happens as the Safer Gambling Week 2024, which is set to occur from November 18-24 to get a better record than before, approaches.
That’s where Safer Gambling Week — or SG Week, as it’s more cheekily known — came in: By encouraging players to take the use of those responsible gambling tools very seriously indeed, said the BGC, based on its official press release, backed — full disclosure — by cold hard data.
For one, BGC cites SG Week as the main reason for roughly $54% of players who set a deposit limit doing so for the initial time. The findings of this study also indicate that there was an upward trend recorded in 2022, and it showed an 18% increase in the total number of deposit limit users.
The BGC noted that maximum stake limits, another widely used measure, had increased by 300% and were heavily utilized during SG Week 2023.
The advocacy group points out that all of this is connected to players gaining more awareness of the perils associated with wagering and wanting to learn how to regulate individual conduct and interaction with the activity more effectively.
As per the BGC, 83,242 account holders have made the preference of deposit limit very common among title holders. Al this indicates that players are gradually getting more informed on how relative gambling limits do not necessarily mean players must self-exclude or stop gambling completely.
The SG Week messaging delivered over 50 million message impressions that include reach on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X.
This is 30% higher than the figures obtained during the previous year when the same social media channels yielded 30 million campaign impressions.
Commenting on the findings, BGC CEO and Acting Chair Michael Dugher emphasized the importance of the results. According to him, the updated data shows how successful Safer Gambling Week is at encouraging the use of responsible gambling resources in the regulated sector. Dugher highlighted that millions of customers are now utilizing tools such as deposit limits and timeouts, underscoring the campaign’s success.
However, the issue of problem gambling continues to be a sensitive subject among players in that it is a cause of concern. Currently, 43000 problem gamblers in Great Britain cannot effectively control their urge to gamble. In response to this, the government intends to start an affordability test in August with subsequent tests to be conducted at intervals of six months to February 2025.
At the same time, there has been an increasing call for RG measures and tools to ensure gambling is done responsibly. To be more precise in the estimation of the individuals that can be considered problem gamblers, institutions such as the UK Gambling Commission are implementing a different approach that may point to a number as high as 1. 3 million, as reported by the newspaper, The Guardian. However, the regulator acknowledges that this may have been influenced by methodological changes rather than a tendency towards a higher incidence of gambling problems.
Among these challenges, the eighth edition of the Safer Gambling Week has been developing great popularity as one of the efficient endeavors to prevent problem gambling.
