GamStop, the UK’s national online gambling self-exclusion scheme, has revealed that the number of registrations on its platform rose by 25% year-on-year during the first six months of 2021.
At the time when it published its bi-annual review, GamStop announced that a total of 40,000 individuals had been registered with its self-exclusion service during the first half of the year. The figure represented a dramatic 25% increase in the number of registrations on 2020 comparatives, with the overall number of people who registered with the British online gambling self-exclusion service currently standing at more than 218,000.
GamStop revealed that March was the month with the second-biggest number of registrations on record.
In its bi-annual report, GamStop presented a breakdown of applicants, which showed that 70% of the registrants were male gamblers, while the remaining 30% were female gamblers. Of those registered with the national online gambling self-exclusion scheme, 58% have chosen the maximum 5-year exclusion period.
Furthermore, GamStop cited an increase in the number of younger people accessing the service. What has been found as a concerning trend, was the fact that more than half of the persons registered with the self-exclusion service (59%) were young people between the age of 18 and 34, while 41% of the individuals registered with the scheme were between 25 and 34 years of age.
GamStop Sought Broader Insight into Gambling Behaviours of British People
Fiona Palmer, the CEO of GamStop, said it was encouraging to see that British customers were still joining the self-exclusion scheme and use it as a way to recovery, so the review only highlighted the importance of raising the awareness of tools that could help British residents deal with their problem gambling and tackle gambling-related harm.
Britain’s national online gambling self-exclusion service launched its bi-annual review to get more in-depth information and further details regarding the trends on its platform, as well as to offer broader insight into UK residents’ gambling behaviours.
As part of its review, GamStop hired Sonnet, a research agency, to carry out the first independent evaluation of its self-exclusion platform. Sonnet revealed that, according to the results of a survey it held among 3,300 registered users, the British online gambling self-exclusion scheme was used by people from a broad range of socio-economic, ethnicity and age groups who experience problem gambling-related harm.
The aforementioned survey found that the majority of GamStop users (89%) were white, 3% were Asian, 2% originated from black ethnicity groups and 1% of the self-exclusion scheme users were mixed-race.
The socio-economic groups these people originated from were also different, with 29% of the scheme participants living in households with an annual pre-tax income worth more than £48,000. Almost half of the participants in GamStop’s self-exclusion scheme (48%) lived in households earning over £32,000 per annum. Also, over 75% of the people had full- or part-time jobs, while over 60% had no children in the household they lived in.
- Author
Olivia Cole
