The Bristol Researchers Trying to Understand Why We Gamble — and What It Costs Us

A team based at the University of Bristol is leading some of the most ambitious gambling research in the country. Their findings paint a troubling picture of how harm reaches far beyond the individual.

When the University of Bristol launched its Hub for Gambling Harms Research in 2022, backed by £4 million from GambleAware, it became the first dedicated academic research centre of its kind in Britain. Four years on, it has grown into a network spanning 27 disciplines across nine countries, and its work is quietly reshaping the conversation about gambling in this city and beyond.

The hub sits within the university’s population health infrastructure, which is deliberate. Its researchers treat gambling harm not as a personal failing but as a public health issue — one that touches housing, mental health, debt, family breakdown, and suicide. According to the hub’s own figures, around 20 per cent of the UK population is currently affected by gambling, either directly or through someone close to them. Up to 496 suicides are linked to gambling every year in England alone.

That last number, by the way, is not a typo. It is an estimate the hub cites based on research into the connection between gambling disorder and self-harm, and it’s one of the reasons the centre exists.

Why does gambling harm affect some communities more than others?

One of the hub’s core research strands looks at how social and spatial inequalities shape who gets hurt. Bristol is an ideal setting for this work. The city’s well-documented pockets of deprivation sit alongside areas of considerable affluence, and the distribution of betting premises has historically reflected that divide. Nationally, the Gambling Commission’s latest data shows betting shop numbers continuing their long decline — 5,825 premises as of March 2025, down 1.8 per cent on the previous year and nearly 23 per cent fewer than pre-pandemic levels. But the closure of physical shops has not meant less gambling. It has meant a migration online.

The commission’s most recent annual report puts total industry gross gambling yield at £16.8 billion for the year to March 2025, a 7.3 per cent increase driven almost entirely by the online sector. Remote casino, betting and bingo operations now account for £7.8 billion in yield — 46 per cent of the entire market. That shift from shopfront to smartphone is precisely what Bristol’s researchers are trying to understand.

The hub’s Challenge 3 research stream, led by Emmanouil Tranos and Jo Large, examines what social and spatial inequalities make gambling harms worse. Their work includes a funded project investigating the relationship between betting shops and crime across different types of English geography — urban centres, rural areas, seaside towns, old industrial heartlands. For Bristol, where the council’s own gambling policy explicitly acknowledges the tension between protecting vulnerable people and supporting the local economy, this research has direct implications.

How big is the UK gambling problem in 2026?

The numbers are stark. The Gambling Commission reported 37.4 million active online gambling accounts in the UK as of its latest data, a 24 per cent increase compared to pre-lockdown levels. Slots alone generated £689 million in gross yield in a single quarter at the start of 2025, with the number of active monthly accounts reaching a record 4.5 million.

Broader online casino statistics paint a similar picture globally. The shift to digital platforms has not simply moved gambling from one location to another; it has made it constant, portable, and — for the roughly 2.5 per cent of UK adults classified as problem gamblers — significantly harder to escape.

This is the context in which Bristol’s hub operates. Its researchers are not campaigning to ban gambling. They are trying to produce the kind of evidence that might lead to regulation that actually works, at a time when the technology is evolving faster than the rules.

What has the hub actually changed?

Research centres can sometimes feel abstract. Bristol’s hub has tried to avoid that. Earlier this year, two of its graduates — Benjamin Parker and Jordan White — launched a toolkit called ‘From Freshers’ Week to Losing Streak’, designed to help universities identify and support students affected by gambling. The pair developed it through the hub’s connections after discovering, through their own survey work, how pervasive gambling was among their peers. They received £8,000 from Runway, the university’s startup accelerator, and are now working with Ara Recovery For All, a charity supporting people affected by gambling harm in the South West and Wales.

Their work points to something the hub’s own data supports. Among male university students in the UK, a quarter participate in online sports betting, averaging 91 betting days per year — roughly every weekday during term. The industry’s £1.5 billion annual advertising spend, much of it concentrated around sport, is not coincidental.

The hub also hosted its third international colloquium in October 2025 at We the Curious on the harbourside, bringing together researchers, regulators, lived experience representatives and political commentators. It was free and open, which says something about the kind of institution it wants to be.

What does this mean for Bristol?

The city already has a gambling policy governed by the 2005 Gambling Act, but that legislation was written before smartphones existed. The government’s long-awaited review of gambling regulation, which has been trundling along for years, is expected to draw heavily on the kind of evidence Bristol’s hub produces.

In the meantime, the hub’s work offers something that is often missing from the gambling debate: data that is both rigorous and rooted in the real experience of communities. Bristol is not just a convenient base for this research. It is, in many ways, the subject.

For a city that prides itself on independence and social conscience, having this kind of institution on its doorstep matters. Whether the policymakers listening at the other end are paying enough attention is, of course, another question entirely.

The Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research is based at the University of Bristol and funded by GambleAware. The Gambling Commission publishes annual and quarterly industry statistics.