Oxford Insights
The context and opportunity
Last year, the UK government implemented a statutory gambling levy that requires gambling firms to pay a mandated amount into a fund to pay for gambling-related harms prevention, research and treatment. This replaced a voluntary payment model, and is expected to raise over £100 million a year. Of the levy funding, 30% is earmarked for gambling-related harms prevention activities, some of which is distributed to local authorities across England by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) within the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
There is very little national data on the efficacy of gambling-related harms prevention approaches and activities, so the new funding presented an opportunity to build that evidence base in a consistent way which could be reported to government.
Oxford Insights has been DHSC’s and OHID’s delivery partner from discovery to private beta, designing a platform through which local authorities can report on how they’re spending their levy funding on gambling-related harms prevention activities. Our aim was to design a data-collection platform that will help evolve gambling-related harms prevention work, beginning with a deep understanding of its core users.
Discovery: defining an approach
We defined three key user groups through a combination of interviews, surveys, and workshops with stakeholders during the discovery phase:
1. The local authority public health leads who would be entering the activity data were often spread across multiple public health projects, and gambling-related harms work was often at a very early stage. This suggested that the reporting process needed to be proportionate to local authorities’ levy allocation, and not be too granular for their early-stage work.
2. DHSC regional leads were responsible for monitoring local authorities’ spending and activities. Given they would be reviewing a dozen or more local authorities’ data, we needed to make sure data was standardised and comparable across authorities, and underspend/overspend could be spotted quickly. The process should also focus on reporting on relationship-building, such as with at-risk groups and VCSEs, which we learned from other public health streams was pivotal for strong outcomes down the line.
3. Lastly, the DHSC gambling-related harms grants managers needed a snapshot of spending activity at a national level. They also needed the reporting process itself to be flexible enough to collect new data types, depending on the strategic focus at a given time.
Alongside our DHSC and OHID stakeholders, we decided to implement a two-tier digital reporting model – an annual maturity assessment, with quarterly financial reporting – to track the levy’s short- and longer-term performance alongside local authorities’ growth in the area of gambling-related harms prevention.
Alpha: building the right solution
In the alpha phase, we designed and tested a prototype reporting system; this was based on the gambling-related harms plans which local authorities had told us about in discovery, and the grants team’s needs. For example, we geared the question structure towards qualitative data on collaboration and initial steps, as most local authorities were still in the early phases of gambling-related harms prevention work.
Through user sessions, we developed consistent, familiar question terminology, and looked for the right blend of free text and multiple-choice options to balance ease of review and depth of data collection.
During this phase, we also introduced regular ‘show and tells’ with key stakeholders to get their feedback on the process, ensuring it was designed with end users in mind.
Private beta: developing a scalable service
We had three key aims during the private beta phase:
1. Ensuring users felt confident completing the reports independently end-to-end,
2. Assessing if the process felt proportionate to their levy funding, and
3. Ensuring it could be completed within their already busy schedules.
To do this, we built and tested the service with local authorities using real data in test and production environments, as well as conducting 35 usability testing sessions on the finer details of navigation and content design which could affect user experience and data quality.
We deliberately tested with a mix of local authority users to get a full picture, including level of gambling-related harms prevention activity, levy allocation, region, and users with accessibility needs.
This informed iterations to the platform around navigation, language clarity, and user accessibility, including streamlining the proposed user types to simplify the platform’s structure and increase usability. We also continued to evolve the product’s data downloads and other outputs based on ongoing conversations with the platform’s core DHSC users.
Throughout private beta, we designed the data map and questions that local authorities would be answering about their gambling-related harms prevention activities to ensure that the data would flow into the annual maturity assessment report, reducing the burden on local authorities by cutting down on duplication.
Next steps
We’re now working with DHSC to roll out the service to local authorities so they can submit their first quarterly reports in the autumn. This includes activating the service’s KPI dashboards, support channels and feedback mechanisms to monitor performance in a real-life setting.
Grid photo by Julian Gojani on Unsplash
