NatCen says credit card ban efficient in curing gambling harm

The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) has published an evaluation of the ban on credit card transactions for the purpose of gambling in the United Kingdom.

Implemented in April 2020, NatCen has had four years to collate and assess data, as the country became the first major jurisdiction to enforce a blanket ban on credit card use for gambling.

NatCen hails credit card ban as a success

As the leading not-for-profit social research outfit in the United Kingdom, NatCen has the resources to draw broader conclusions about the efficacy and effectiveness of various policies.

The upshot in 2024 is that the ban on credit card use for online and offline gambling has produced the desired results, although room for improvement exists. Commenting on the evaluation, Gambling Commission Executive Director Tim Miller had this to say:

"We are pleased that the evaluation has found that the ban was successfully implemented, increased friction in gambling with credit as intended and was perceived to be a positive change."

Most notably, the law has added a layer of protection for vulnerable people and players, allowing them to reduce the gambling-related harm they experience.

NatCen found it equally important that the ban was implemented at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially averting an epidemic in problem gambling. Setting out to assess the effectiveness of the measure, NatCen has arrived at several key findings about the measure.

For starters, NatCen noted that the ban on credit card use in the gambling industry has been implemented successfully. The research outfit also estimated that the ban had been a positive change for people who gamble, impacting positively not just individual gamblers, but also their family, friends, and acquaintances.

As an unintended consequence, the ban has also helped strengthen the existing treatment and support services and networks, probably a result of the fact that fewer people were experiencing gambling-related harm as would otherwise have been should the ban never been rolled out.

In terms of raising awareness for the ban, people who were already experiencing mid to high levels of problem gambling were the most likely to know about the measure, although the ban did not account for the change in gambling patterns in all instances.

Credit card ban may turn out to be a qualified success

Yet, the ban has been described as a qualified success by some. Melanie Ellis, partner at Law Firm NorthridgeLaw, said that the ban demonstrated that people in the high-risk group were more likely to use a credit card to gamble than before.

"Further, once results were adjusted and stratified, no significant reduction in the use of borrowed money to gamble was found for those with moderate to high PGSI scores. Can the credit card ban be labelled a success, when it has apparently not changed the behavior of those it was implemented to protect," she asked.

People who were experiencing low levels or no levels of problem gamblers were more likely than their peers in the moderate and high-risk groups to reduce their dependence on credit cards or loans to gamble.

60% of participants said that the ban did not impact their borrowing habits, 21% said that they were indeed less likely to borrow, and 9% said that they would probably borrow in future to sustain their habit.

However, most people were loath to use illegal forms of borrowing. The credit card ban though did not mean that people were more aware of the availability of tools that help minimize gambling harms.

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