New research funded by the statutory levy reveals that safer gambling tools are structurally ill-equipped to support those affected by someone else’s gambling behaviour.
The Gambling Commission investigated the lived experiences of affected others by conducting in-depth interviews with 25 adults across Great Britain.
All participants had experienced adverse effects from another person’s gambling within the previous 12 months, giving the study a grounded and immediate relevance.
A central finding is that affected others tend to encounter safer gambling tools “almost exclusively at crisis point,” long after harms have already taken hold.
Because safer gambling interventions require the person gambling to initiate and maintain them, the system is not well-designed to help those caught in the fallout.
The Gambling Survey for Great Britain estimates that around 9% of British adults qualify as affected others, with more than a quarter having experienced at least one severe consequence.
Severe consequences are formally defined within the research as relationship breakdown, significant financial loss, or exposure to violence or abuse.
Despite the scale of these harms, less than one in five affected others actually seek any form of support, according to the most recent Gambling Survey for Great Britain data.
The research highlights how the accessibility and frictionless nature of online gambling has made it far harder for those around a problem gambler to identify warning signs.
One participant described their experience with a partner, saying: “She said it was just a game from the App Store – obviously it wasn’t. It was all very, very secretive.”
This invisibility creates what the study describes as a state of “sustained hypervigilance,” allowing harms to quietly escalate until they reach an undeniable crisis point.
By the time affected others recognise the full extent of the damage, those harms have typically spread across multiple areas of their lives simultaneously.
Health was the most frequently reported domain of harm, followed by relationships and financial situation, consistent with findings from previous Gambling Survey for Great Britain research.
The term affected others is broad, covering parents, adult children, siblings, friends and colleagues, though partners tend to bear the heaviest indirect burden due to shared finances and proximity.
Gambling advertising emerged as a “consistent and unprompted theme across interviews,” with one male partner of a gambler describing adverts as “inescapable.”
He elaborated: “It feels like from every direction, it’s on every screen and then we got one through the post from Gala Bingo, now they’re posting it to our house!”
Other participants expressed frustration that promotional offers, bonuses and pop-ups continued to reach them even after mitigating measures had been put in place.
The Gambling Commission has structured its research programme around six written priority themes, with this study falling under the Gambling-related harm and vulnerability category.
Humankind Research, which specialises in qualitative studies with hard-to-reach audiences, was commissioned to conduct the interviews as part of the Consumer Voice programme.
A companion report drawing from the same interviews is expected in the coming months, focusing on what the findings mean for support services and treatment providers.
