INTERVIEW AUGUST 2026

Interview with Heather Wardle: Building the UK's First Independent Evidence Centre on Gambling Harms

A historian by training, Wardle came to gambling research almost by accident twenty years ago. She now leads the UK's largest independent effort to close its evidence gaps.

Interview

Our editor had a conversation with Professor Heather Wardle, Professor of Gambling Research and Policy at the University of Glasgow and Director of the Gambling Harms Research UK Evidence Centre, about the data gaps that still shape what is and is not known about gambling harm, and the five-year effort now underway to close them.

Heather Wardle, Professor of Gambling Research and Policy at the University of Glasgow. Image courtesy of Heather Wardle.

Box-out: Heather Wardle, Professor of Gambling Research and Policy at the University of Glasgow

Name: Professor Heather Wardle

Title: Professor of Gambling Research and Policy; Director, Gambling Harms Research UK Evidence Centre

Institution: University of Glasgow

Previous Roles: Director, Gambling & Place Hub, Geofutures (2015–2020)

Expertise: Gambling survey methodology, female gambling behaviour, gambling and suicidality, data infrastructure and open science

Current Role: Principal Investigator, Gambling Harms Research UK Evidence Centre, a consortium led by the University of Glasgow with the University of Sheffield, Swansea University and King's College London, funded through the British statutory Gambling Levy

An Accidental Career

Wardle's route into gambling research began by chance. In 2006, while working in the health and wellbeing department at the National Centre for Social Research, her boss approached her in the office kitchen: the team was starting work on a gambling survey, and given Wardle's own interest in horse racing, did she want to work on it? That project became the British Gambling Prevalence Survey of 2007, commissioned just as the Gambling Commission itself was being established. Some of the colleagues she met at the Commission that year are still there today.

Wardle went on to work on the 2010 survey and, alongside it, completed a PhD tracing female gambling behaviour in Britain back to the 1950s. Trained originally as a historian, she used that lens to trace how women's gambling had been shaped by the wider political and regulatory environment over time, and how that history might explain the shift toward online gambling and female-targeted advertising. By around 2013, she had moved from being a generalist health researcher to specialising in gambling full-time.

Out of that work, she identifies a gap that has stayed with her since. "We still view gambling quite often through the male lens," she says. "All the survey work, you nearly always end up saying men gambled more than women, more men experience harms, and women are reduced to the afterthought, the comparator. Their experiences are not probed or understood in a deeper way." She sees the same gender bias across the wider gambling ecosystem, recalling a 2014 meeting of around twenty-five gambling company chief executives where she was the only woman in the room.

Horse racing at Kempton Park Racecourse, UK

Largo Bay, ridden by George Rooke, wins at Kempton Park Racecourse, UK, 21 September 2022. © Paul Blake / Alamy



RESEARCH perspective

"We have these massive asymmetries of insight, and asymmetries of scrutiny."

— Professor Heather Wardle, Director, GHR-UK Evidence Centre

Building the GHR-UK Evidence Centre

Wardle now leads the Gambling Harms Research UK Evidence Centre, launched in 2026 as the UK's largest independent gambling harms research effort. It is funded through the British statutory Gambling Levy, introduced in April 2025, under which most operators pay between 0.1 and 1.1 per cent of gross gambling yield depending on the licensed activity, while lottery operators are assessed on different bases. Problem gambling is estimated to impose around £1.4 billion a year in fiscal costs on the UK, primarily through welfare, healthcare, criminal justice and homelessness; the estimate excludes costs to affected others, family breakdown and gambling-related suicide.

The centre runs a hub-and-spoke model, coordinating 19 Innovation Partnerships based at universities across Britain, each researching a different part of the gambling ecosystem, from sports betting to video games, alongside 32 rapid evidence reviews and four UKRI policy fellowships delivered so far.

Martin Jones and Fay Laidler, who both have direct personal experience of gambling-related harms, have been appointed as the centre's lived-experience leads. At the centre's launch, Wardle described the funding as a "vital reset" for the field: "For too long, gambling research has been under-resourced and overlooked. New funding through the Levy and UKRI marks a vital reset, strengthening the quality and scale of gambling harms research and ensuring policy is driven by rigorous, independent evidence."

Wardle describes her own role as twofold: growing the research ecosystem, and staying close enough to policymakers that the research answers the questions they actually have. She is candid that the timeline is tight.

"Everybody wants to see results now," she says, while data infrastructure takes years to build properly.

The Houses of Parliament and Palace of Westminster, London. © Cavan Images / Alamy

Open Data, Closed Doors

Wardle identifies the biggest obstacle as not any single research question but the structure of data access itself. Researchers who work directly with operators, she explains, typically do so under non-disclosure agreements, meaning the underlying data is rarely made public and nobody else can test or replicate the findings. From a data science standpoint, she calls this poor practice. "We are much more interested in thinking about ways in which data can be open and available to independent researchers," she says, "without having to enter into commercial, confidential relationships with the operators."

Wardle points to Norway as an example of what becomes possible with better access. She is herself a co-author, alongside Ingeborg Rossow of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, on a 2024 study using tracking data from 40,000 customers of Norsk Tipping, the larger of Norway's two state-owned gambling monopolies, to test whether population-level gambling consumption predicts the rate of excessive gambling, a link known as the total consumption model.

That analysis is possible in Norway, she says, because researchers can access operator data directly; in Great Britain, they cannot. The Netherlands, she notes, has taken a regulatory step toward the same goal, requiring operators to share data with researchers, though the process there has been far from straightforward.

What the Latest Survey Data Actually Shows

Wardle's team published two pieces of research in July 2026: the latest Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) data, now with three years of trend data behind it, and a companion piece addressing criticism of the survey series itself. Different survey methodologies produce different prevalence estimates, she acknowledges, a point critics have used to question the Gambling Survey for Great Britain's findings; the Gambling Commission itself cautions that direct comparisons between GSGB and surveys using different methodologies are not appropriate, and that the correct comparison is between successive waves of GSGB itself. Wardle's argument goes further: what matters most, she says, is whether the underlying patterns of association hold up, not just the point estimates.

To test that, Wardle's team replicated analyses across both the Gambling Survey for Great Britain and the Health Survey for England. Both surveys, she found, independently identified online casino gambling, online slots and electronic gambling machines as the products most strongly associated with higher Problem Gambling Severity Index scores.

Two different surveys, run at different times with different people, producing the same pattern, is, in her view, exactly the kind of replication that should increase confidence in the findings rather than the sustained effort by some critics to discredit the survey series over differences in the raw estimates.

A Missing Generation of Data

Wardle is more cautious about claims regarding how younger, digitally native gamblers behave differently, because the evidence base does not yet support strong conclusions. The Gambling Commission has run a youth gambling survey for close to fifteen years, but changes to its methodology mean there is no consistent trend line, unlike smoking or alcohol research, which has multi-decade time series to draw on. The Gambling Survey for Great Britain's own trend data only goes back to 2023.

One finding from her own research does stand out as high-impact. In a study of 1,941 young people aged 16 to 24, surveyed once in 2019 and again roughly a year later, Wardle and colleagues found that those whose Problem Gambling Severity Index score increased between the two surveys were, after adjusting for other factors, more likely to have attempted suicide than those whose scores had not changed. The finding is an association rather than proof of a direct causal link, but Wardle describes it as a policy issue that needs to be treated with the seriousness it warrants.

Policy, Public Opinion, and the Algorithm Black Box

Between 2015 and 2020, Wardle served as deputy chair of the Gambling Commission's Advisory Board for Safer Gambling, advising the Commission and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on policy including the statutory levy, protections for children and young people, and the 2018 debate over fixed-odds betting terminals. Not all of that advice was adopted, but some was; she is matter-of-fact about it: evidence is only one input into policy decisions that also weigh political considerations. Public attitudes toward gambling, meanwhile, run more negative than positive overall even though more than half the population gambles in some form, and the public's consistent preference for stronger advertising and sponsorship restrictions has not been reflected in policy to the same degree.

She is similarly concerned about the oversight of AI-driven harm-detection algorithms. In Britain, remote gambling licensees are responsible for their own harm-detection systems and processes, including when third-party providers are used. "What those algorithms are doing, and the processes behind them, is not available for public scrutiny," she says, "and yet we are relying on those as the first pillar of prevention. We need to have better understanding and better independent oversight of what is actually happening in these algorithmic black boxes and how AI is being deployed."

She contrasts this with Spain, where the regulator has developed a single standardised risk-detection algorithm intended to become mandatory for all online gambling operators, the opposite of the British operator-by-operator model.

Twenty Years, and Still Not Bored

Asked what has surprised her most across two decades in the field, Wardle struggles to name a single moment, describing her career instead as a series of gradual shifts rather than one turning point. What has changed more recently, she says, is the polarisation of the debate. She has been characterised by some industry critics as a prohibitionist seeking to restrict people's freedom to gamble, a framing she rejects outright.

"That's not at all where our perspective is driven from," she says. "Our perspective is driven from offering greater protections to the public. It's not just about the freedom of people to engage in certain forms of gambling. It's the freedom of children and young people to be protected from encouraged engagement in an activity we have said is inappropriate for them, and the freedom of individuals not to be targeted by a product they have no interest in."

She still enjoys horse racing herself, a habit that goes back to family trips to Kempton Park on Boxing Day, and says her interest was never rooted in opposition to gambling but in understanding who needs protecting and why. A decade spent researching gambling and suicidality, she says, has made clear how serious the stakes genuinely are.

Article written by Elisabet Johansson