Dear Gambling Commission,
Please provide information showing the number of reports or complaints made by customers of gambling operators, that were specific to the operators 'Sportsbook' operations only (not casino, poker etc.) for each year since 2010.

Please provide the information showing a breakdown of the complaints by complaint type for each year.For example, 'Cash Out', 'Refusal to payout', 'System failures' etc.

Yours faithfully,

Paul Carlier

Dear Gambling Commission,
Thank you for your response to my FOIA. Such as it is and as disturbing as it is.

I am amending my request as a result of your response. Therefore my rights to request an internal review of this response to this original FOIA request are reserved and the time afforded me to request an internal review of this initial request should only begin upon the receipt of your response to by amended/refined request. Obviously, your response to my refined/amended request might address the various issues I have with your response and might not require an internal review.
If you do not accept this position and believe that my right to request an internal review of this initial request expires in 40 days, regardless of any refinement or amendment, please urgently advise and I will formally request an internal review of this response, as well as refining the initial FOIA request.

1. In your response you write: "We do not become involved in or “act upon” individual complaints."
It is concerning that you omitted the word 'reports' from this position. Do you distinguish, or are you able to distinguish, between a 'report' with evidence from an expert or experienced individual and a complaint?

2. It is disturbing that the Gambling Commission would adopt such an extraordinary position that it will not act upon an individual report or complaint regardless of the significance or weight of the evidence presented.
Even The FCA has now been forced to publicly declare such an approach wrong.
I remind you that every tragedy or scandal that is eventually exposed will have involved a party with oversight responsibility failing to act on what will have invariably been the first and/or 'individual' report or complaint.
The Gambling Commission appears to be saying that it continues to adopt the approach that the Post Office and those in Government and oversight roles for it, and endorses their decision not to act upon the individual report of Alan Bates? Please advise.

Notwithstanding that my FOIA Request did not ask you for any information as to what you did or did not act upon.

3. You claim that the Gambling Commission does not categorise complaints. According to your response all you do is log the complaint with no categorisation and no simple means of filtering any of the complaints by any simple means, be it by category or nature, or even gambling harm significance or flags?

Are you really saying that when you log a complaint or report, there are literally no fields for your staff to complete beyond: 'Is this a complaint or report ?' - 'Yes or No?'

That's it. You are saying that no other field exists for your staff to fill in when logging a report on your system?

Please provide a list of all fields that your system requires staff to complete or 'boxes to check' when it receives a report or a complaint about a gambling operator.
(The FOIA obliges you to engage with the requester to enable them to refine their approach and identify what type of information might be held so as to provide the information requested. Provision of these fields will enable me to identify what information you hold that is instantly searchable and simple for you to provide.)

I find it impossible to believe that any regulator operates with a system with significantly less functionality than Microsoft Excel 1985. No fields for data entry, no means therefore of filtering by any field.

4. I must refer you to the First Tier Tribunal decision in 'Paul Carlier vs Information Commissioner and the Financial Conduct Authority'. A link to which can be found here https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKFTT/GR...

I urge you not to breach the various findings within that judgement in my favour. Please note that the Judge has warned that any failure to abide by those findings would be considered contempt.

In their defence The FCA argued that it was unable to identify any information that might enable them to comply with the FOIA Requests that were specific to representations made by The FCA at their Annual Public Meeting in October 2022.
I referred them to the various documents that they had where they conducted 'APM Prep', comprising various back and forth communications establishing statements on various issues that would inevitably be raised by the public at the APM or had already been the subject of questions sent in by the public prior to the APM.
Two weeks ago The FCA were forced to disclose 650 pages of exactly that type of material and more.

I have made an application for a finding of contempt on this and other disturbing grounds.

Of course The FCA knew such material existed and how much time they spent preparing for questions, especially on issues they knew to be awkward for them, ahead of there APM. The FCA problem was that they did not know I was aware such material existed. A public body is not permitted to adopt a position or make a representation because it presumes the requester is not aware of the truth and facts.

I am therefore forced to refer you to your own paper published on 31st May 2022:
https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/ab...

This demonstrates that you are clearly monitoring or logging various metrics.

I further refer you to your paper published on 23rd May 2023:
https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/ab...

Whilst it acknowledges gaps in evidence or data the entirety of this document rather contradicts the statements made in this FOIA response. For example, it proclaims particularly but not exclusively:

"At the Gambling Commission we are a people focussed and evidence-led regulator. That means we recognise that better data, better research and better evidence will lead to better gambling regulation and better outcomes for consumers who gamble, their communities and the gambling sector itself."

[...]

"When we refer to data, we mean digital information about people, companies and systems. While the legal definition of data covers paper and digital records, the focus of this document is on digital information. Depending on context, this could be administrative, operational and transactional data as well as analytical and statistical data."

[...]

"The Gambling Commission uses a range of data, research and insights to inform the decisions that we make and provide advice to the Government about gambling behaviour and the gambling market. We are responsible for the production of official statistics on the size and shape of the gambling industry, rates of participation in gambling, and the prevalence of problem gambling, in both adults and children. In addition, we track wider trends in consumer behaviour, listen to the full breadth of consumer voices, and deep dive quantitatively and qualitatively on key issues, impacts and emerging areas of interest."

[...]

"The approach that we have taken to identify evidence gaps and priorities is underpinned by the principles of Evidence Assurance. Evidence Assurance is a process we use that ensures that decisions we make are underpinned by the best available data and evidence and is based on recognised principles.

We use a rigorous, consistent, and transparent process to collate, interpret and weigh up the overall strength of the evidence base for a given issue or topic. Where there are gaps in the evidence base, we are transparent about that and identify what ideal evidence would look like, and how those gaps could be filled.

Our evidence assurance process is underpinned by a five-phase approach:

What is the question, issue or problem?
What would the ideal evidence base look like?
What do we have in reality, and what are the evidence gaps?
What is our assessment (quality and quantity) and interpretation of the evidence base?
How does this inform our advice, position and or next steps?"

[...]

"We work with a variety of stakeholders and interested parties to gain insight and perspective about gambling behaviour in Great Britain. This helps to support our own commissioned research, statistics, regulatory casework and operator data analysis, to build a large volume and diverse range of evidence. We also have ready access to the widest range of experience and perspectives through our expert panels.1

Our forward plans also include developing our capacity to be a proactive, data led regulator, using the power of data and advanced analytics to make us more efficient and effective in carrying out our regulation.

The Commission contributes to the wider ecosystem by:

collecting and publishing official statistics
conducting wider research and data analysis
providing and publishing evidence-based advice to government and other stakeholders
using our data and research from the wider ecosystem to monitor changes that may have an impact on the regulatory framework."

I look forward to your response.

Yours faithfully,

Paul Carlier

Dear Freedom of Information,
My FOIA Request did indeed refer to complaints or reports the GC received from customers of operators. Whereas, your initial response only referred to and implied an interpretation as to it being only 'complaints' by to the GC made by customers of the operator/s in question.

Notwithstanding that a complaint should always also be classified as a report of conduct to the regulator.

Thank you for providing the various fields/categories/types/sub/types. Can you please provide a copy of the 'Field Directory' that you will have that defines what each field/category/type etc means. I can then determine which of them will likely reveal the information I am requesting.

Furthermore, and in the meantime, please provide the total number of reports or complaints received by the GC from customers of operators for each of those years included in my initial request. Just the total number for each year. Nothing more or less at this stage and whist we refine this request.

Regards

Paul Carlier

Yours sincerely,

Paul Carlier

Dear Gambling Commission,
Further to your response to my FOIA dated 18th September:

1. To be clear, from your response you are saying that prior to 2016 the Gambling Commission data was so poorly recorded that you are unable to distinguish between a customer complaint, a report of potential breaches of applicable codes or law by an expert or a basic enquiry, for example, as to the address of the Gambling Commission?

1.1. I refer you to the file that I have emailed to you separately under this FOIA reference which is information provided by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) in response to a very similar FOIA request asking for a breakdown of report and complaint types and their 'subject'. They were able to provide this incredibly comprehensive response for this period prior to 2016 and within the timeframe and costs applicable to FOIA Requests.

1.2. Is it not embarrassing for the Gambling Commission to claim that it cannot provide so much as one line of information for this same period and is unable to distinguish between any incoming contact , when The FOS was able to late and produce this FOIA response?

1.3. Furthermore, how was the Gambling Commission able to regulate, investigate and prevent harms and suicides if it was incapable of recording any incoming communication and distinguishing the type or significance of them?

1.4. In order for me to refine my request for the period prior to 2016, please:

a) confirm how complaints were handled and how a complaint was identified and passed to the relevant team to investigate. Surely there has to be records or logs within the complaints team as to the work or outcomes they produced over that period?

b) Likewise, confirm how many investigations of gambling operators were opened for each year between 2010 and 2016.
And explain how an investigation was initiated if there was no means of distinguishing incoming communications as you claim.

2. I will revert with a narrowed and refined request for the period 2016 and later in due course.

Yours faithfully,

Paul Carlier