Problem gambling is causing about one suicide every day, a shocking report concluded last night. The House of Lords review found that betting blights the lives of two million Britons, with 50,000 children now hooked.
Around 300,000 people are addicted – each harming six loved ones through crime, domestic violence, family breakup and lost jobs.
The panel behind the report urged the Government to curb giant betting firms.
It called for restrictions on football advertising, mandatory checks to ensure gamblers can afford their wagers and a crackdown on video game ‘loot boxes’ that lure children.
Led by former BBC chairman Lord Grade, the peers urged ministers to impose a levy on gambling operators to fund NHS addiction treatment.
Rebecca Jones, 30, was left to bring up two children alone when husband Ben got three years in prison last November for stealing to fuel his gambling addiction
They said they had heard ‘appalling’ stories of vulnerable people being targeted by betting firms, with customers feeling ‘groomed’.
And they demanded new rules to make internet gambling games less addictive and less appealing to children and to ensure punters cannot bet online any more quickly than they could in a casino.
Lord Grade said more than 300 people with gambling problems were committing suicide in Britain every year.
He is also concerned the gambling epidemic may have worsened during the pandemic, adding: ‘Every day that goes by without action is more harm created, more potential suicides, more misery.’
A Government source said last night that a mandatory levy had not been ruled out and ‘nothing is off the table’.
The 200-page report – Gambling Harm, Time for Action – criticised Labour’s 2005 Gambling Act, which liberalised betting laws.
It also highlighted the rise of smartphones that allow wagers at the touch of a button.
It criticised betting firms’ ‘ingenious and often unscrupulous exploitation’ of soft-touch regulation, which had created a ‘perfect storm of addictive 24/7 gambling’.
The peers concluded that around a third of a million people in the UK were problem gamblers. They warned of a ‘ripple effect’ on those close to these addicts – taking the total affected to two million.
Around 55,000 problem gamblers are aged between 11 and 16, even though it is illegal for them to bet.
Girls are twice as likely as adult women to have a problem and boys are three times more at risk than adult men.
The peers said betting firms spend £1.5billion a year on advertising, declaring it a travesty that 60 per cent of their profits come from 5 per cent of their customers.
Joshua Jones ‘died of shame’ when he jumped from a ninth floor balcony aged 23 in 2015 after struggling to cope with his gambling debts
They accused firms of inducing customers to continue gambling when obvious they cannot afford it.
Among a series of 65 recommendations, the peers said all new online games should be tested against a ‘harm indicator’ scale before they could be launched.
This would test how addictive the game is and whether it particularly appealed to children.
A high score would mean the game would be banned.
The peers said gambling firms should work with banks to make sure customers can afford to spend the money they are betting.
To protect children, the age for playing the National Lottery and all online games should be raised from 16 to 18, the report recommends.
The rules around ‘loot boxes’, mystery chests in video games that have been blamed for giving children a taste for betting, should be changed.
At present these are not treated as gambling because they do not give money as prizes.
The panel said the Premier League should immediately cancel kit sponsorship deals with betting firms, because these help to normalise gambling among the young.
Smaller football clubs should be given three years to adapt.
The peers said it was ‘beyond belief’ that the Government had not imposed a mandatory levy on gambling operators to help pay for NHS addiction services.
The report said the Gambling Commission must start imposing heftier fines.
Liz Ritchie, who founded Gambling with Lives, said last night: ‘If implemented the recommendations set out in this report would go a long way toward reducing gambling harm and ultimately saving lives.
‘Gambling addiction can lead to death. The Government must not prevaricate any longer, lives are literally at stake.’
The Daily Mail has called for tough regulation under a ‘Stop the Gambling Predators’ campaign.
The Bishop of St Albans, Dr Alan Smith, who speaks for the Church of England in the Lords on gambling-related matters, said: ‘The Mail through its campaign is owed a debt.
‘Many of the heart-breaking stories dealing with suicide, financial losses and addictions written in these pages played a significant role in delivering such a comprehensive admonishing of the industry.’
Michael Dugher, chief executive of the Betting and Gaming Council, a standards body set up by the industry, said: ‘There is much in the report that we support and whilst we don’t agree with every recommendation, we feel this is an important contribution to the debate and the approach the Lords took was constructive.
‘We would now urge the Government to bring forward their planned review of the Gambling Act without delay and to work with the industry on an evidence-led approach to future regulation.’
A Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport spokesman said: ‘We are absolutely committed to protecting people from the risks of gambling related harm and… will review the Gambling Act to ensure it is fit for the digital age.’
It is time to stop bookies playing with people’s lives, says gambling report author LORD MICHAEL GRADE
The British have always enjoyed a flutter. For most of us, gambling is a harmless bit of fun that creates employment and generates revenue for the Treasury.
But there is a dark side to this industry. Gambling can also be a toxic product. It requires serious regulation, backed up by the force of law.
Today the House of Lords select committee on gambling, which I chair, publishes a major report into the scourge of gambling addiction, making 66 clear recommendations for the Government as to how to improve the industry.
A 2016 report from the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank found that problem gambling was costing the country £1.2billion per year, quite apart from the terrible impact on people’s lives. When I became chairman of the committee last year, I was shocked to discover about 300,000 people in Britain are struggling with gambling addiction.
About two million more are affected by their connection to problem gamblers: families, friends and employees. On average, more than 300 people with gambling problems commit suicide in Britain every year.
That’s about one a day and, overwhelmingly, these are young men. Our committee spoke with many families who had lost loved ones. It is unutterably tragic, and there is no excuse for any failure to implement safeguards now.
It will save lives. So why have things become so serious? For one thing, problem gambling has been made far worse by the advent of the smartphone. In your pocket you have a machine that allows you, should you wish, to gamble all day, every day.
Anyone can sit on their sofa and lose thousands of pounds just by tapping at a screen.
The regulatory regime for gambling was put together in an analogue age and has not caught up with this digital revolution. I’m reluctant to draw parallels between gambling addiction and alcohol abuse, but there is one telling difference.
An alcoholic will usually reach a point of stupor, and stop drinking for the night. A gambler can keep going much longer, during every waking moment, thanks to the ever-present availability of gambling websites.
On a smartphone, the bets come at terrifying speed. Every turn of the card or spin of the wheel is fast; the games are designed to give rapid gratification.
If you have a proclivity to addiction this is especially dangerous. One of our key recommendations is that speed of play online should be the equivalent of real-world play. In a casino, minutes elapse between spins of the roulette wheel, as the croupiers collect and pay out bets and before more bets are placed and the wheel goes round again.
Online, it is mere seconds between spins. The talented programmers that design online games deliberately build addictiveness into the gameplay.
They make them as attractive as possible, and now the regulator, the Gambling Commission, must act to reduce the harm this is causing. Before games get their stamp of approval, they should be assessed not just for fairness, as they are now, but for addictiveness. It’s time the regulators became proactive.
Most of the laws and regulations necessary to deal with problem gambling are already in place – but are not used. They must also guard much more stringently against games designed to appeal to children. About 55,000 problem gamblers are under 16, a situation that is self-evidently illegal.
The procedures for verifying a player’s age online are clearly not effective. The Gambling Commission does not need to wait for Parliament to tell them how to tackle that: the necessary laws are already in place and must be put into practice immediately. We have serious concern about how children are drawn into online gambling, for example by popular video games such as Fortnite and World Of Warcraft.
These virtual worlds offer young players the chance to buy so-called ‘loot boxes’, lucky dips offering random prizes such as new powers or better weapons for the characters on-screen.
There’s no skill involved. Purchasing a loot box is simply a game of chance – played with real money. A survey by the Gambling Commission in 2018 found that 31 per cent of children aged 11-16 had paid for loot boxes. One gamer told MPs that he was spending up to £1,000 a year on them in a single console football game.
Simply put: this is gambling targeted at children. I find it deeply disturbing. The Netherlands and Belgium have already taken steps to regulate loot boxes. We must follow suit. There is absolutely no reason why most of our proposals could not be implemented tomorrow. For instance, our committee heard of cases where people, recognising they had a gambling problem, told the betting websites they desperately wanted to quit.
They pleaded to be excluded – but the response of the site operators was to entice them back with free bets and bonuses. Also worrying is the absence of financial assessments for new and existing customers.
The banks have indicated they will be happy to comply with ‘affordability checks’ in the industry, which are common for anyone taking out a loan or a credit card. This would screen out gamblers who could not afford to rack up huge losses.
Once again, there is no reason why these should not be implemented now. Yet because the regulator does not come down hard enough on the gambling industry, the betting sites have been allowed to exploit the most vulnerable in society.
The costs in livelihoods and human lives has been all too great. Tragically, the bigger the problem a gambler has, the bigger the profit the operator stands to make.
A nother area of increasing concern is the prevalence of gambling ads in football. Once, people went to the game for the spectacle, but increasingly football is a betting market, like horse racing. With ads on shirts, sponsored stadium names, television adverts and logos on hoardings around the pitch, betting and football are increasingly treated as natural partners. This is wrong.
The relationship between gambling and soccer must be brought to an end. For the Premier League, that should happen immediately. In the lower leagues, where the economic situation is worse, the clubs should have three years to wean themselves off.
The industry will claim this is impossible – to which I say we were warned F1 motor racing would die without tobacco sponsorship, but when the cigarette ads were banned, the races continued.
When I was appointed to head the allparty parliamentary committee, I was struck that its 12 members held very different individual views on this subject.
Yet we ended up with a unanimous report, shocked at what we had found. We are not against gambling. For many, it is fun and part of our culture. But we must no longer ignore the dark side. The price in lives is too high.
Lord Grade is chairman of the select committee on the social and economic impact of the gambling industry and a former executive chairman of ITV