Gambling: Regulatory Reform

[Sir Desmond Swayne in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered reform of gambling regulation.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. We are here to talk about gambling regulation and to discuss the scale of the problem. There is clear evidence that current regulation of the gambling industry is not adequate to protect people from harm, including children and young people. Figures published by the Gambling Commission this October showed that 1.4 million people in Britain have a gambling problem. That number is not spread equally: young men aged 25 to 34 are most affected, with 5.5% experiencing at least moderate-risk gambling, and rates are much higher in more deprived communities, with men in the most deprived areas twice as likely as those in more well-off areas to be moderate-risk gamblers.

Evidence suggests that while many people gamble a bit, the vast majority of profits derived by gambling firms come from a small number of gamblers. The House of Lords Gambling Industry Committee found that 60% of the industry’s profits come from just 5% of customers, who are either problem gamblers or at risk. Recent Gambling Commission figures also show that the harms caused by gambling are increasingly being experienced by children, with the proportion of young people being exposed to significant harms more than doubling between 2023 and 2024. Moreover, the harms caused by gambling are not isolated to the individuals who take part; when it reaches a harmful level, it can have devastating impacts for families and right across communities, in every constituency.

Gambling is linked to addiction, debt and other serious harms, and can negatively impact mental and physical health, relationships, finances, employment and education, but it is comparatively less regulated than other harmful industries and not taxed to directly reflect the harms it causes. In my home patch of Witney, Oxfordshire county council identified gambling addiction as a key risk factor in its recently updated suicide prevention strategy. Research by Gambling with Lives, a charity established in 2018 by families bereaved by gambling suicides, shows that, shockingly, there are hundreds of gambling-related suicides each year, an average of around one a day.

The impact on the public purse is also significant. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that a person experiencing problem gambling leads to an additional £3,700 spend per year in higher welfare payments, healthcare and criminal justice costs, and the cost of homelessness. A research report from the University of Oxford by Dr Naomi Muggleton showed that as many as one in four gamblers are harmed.

The industry continues to develop rapidly, and regulation must keep pace and remain fit for purpose. The Lancet public health commission on gambling found in 2024:

“Digitalisation has transformed the production and operation of commercial gambling… The commercial gambling industry has also developed strong partnerships in media and social media. Sponsoring and partnering with professional sports organisations provides gambling operators with marketing opportunities with huge new audiences.”

In the light of that, some two years ago it was recommended very clearly that a gambling ombudsman should be set up. So far, across two Governments, nothing has happened on that. That is needed to check that all these elements are being dealt with at the same time. Does the hon. Gentleman not agree with me that that should be one of the first acts that the Government should get on with right now?

I fully agree and will cover that shortly.

The Lancet commission concluded that

“gambling poses a threat to public health, the control of which requires a substantial expansion and tightening of gambling industry regulation”.

So what should we do? First, we should limit the impact of gambling advertising, marketing and sponsorship, especially the extent to which children and young people are exposed to it. The industry spends £2 billion a year on gambling advertising and would not be putting that money in without a high degree of certainty that it will be more than paid back in profits. Some 80% of that is spent online, which is why children so often come across gambling and gambling companies.

Research undertaken by the Gambling Commission found that 34% of British bettors admitted to being influenced by advertising, and 16% stated that ads caused them to increase their gambling. Research published this year found that 96% of people aged 11 to 24 had seen gambling marketing messages in the month before the study, and were more likely to bet as a result. On Twitter—or X—alone, there are more than a million gambling ads in the UK each year. Football matches are saturated by gambling ads; there were thousands of gambling messages during the opening weekend of the English premier league alone, across various channels.

Many of our neighbours have taken action. In 2018, Italy banned all online advertising of gambling products. Spain added strong restrictions in 2020. Germany did the same in 2021, as did the Netherlands and Belgium in 2023. Finland and Sweden are set to implement restrictions in 2027. By contrast, here in the UK, the 2023 White Paper on reforming gambling for the digital age acknowledged the harm caused by marketing but opted to continue with a mostly self-regulatory approach. I think such an approach means a huge amount of harm will continue, so I urge the Minister to look again at that, given the damage the sector does and the action already taken by others to mitigate it in their countries. There is strong public support for greater restrictions, too, with polling showing that 51% of people think all gambling advertising, promotion and sponsorship should be banned, and 78% think that nobody under the age of 18 should be exposed to it.

Order. Can I suggest eight minutes to start? I call Gareth Snell.

I will not need that long, Sir Desmond, don’t worry. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard) on securing the debate. After the recent Budget, it is a timely moment to discuss how we regulate the gambling sector in this country, and what that means both for taxation as a way of regulating and for regulation itself.

I will be up front: I come to this debate from a slightly different position. The single largest employer in my constituency is bet365, which employs 5,500 people in some of the high-value jobs in Stoke-on-Trent, and there will be job-loss implications as a result of the Budget. I am not here to plead the case of bet365; the company will do that itself. I also have no interest to declare, because I have never taken any hospitality or financial support from it. However, it is important to put it on the record that there are always consequences to the way that we regulate companies, and real people will lose their jobs as a result of the decisions that this House will presumably take later this evening.

As a result of that constituency interest, I have had to do some rapid learning in this area. I have genuinely had to consider and understand how we do regulation in a way that is good. I am a firm believer that regulation should genuinely be a force for making things better. In this country, we often pull the regulation lever when we see something bad, because we think that regulating can solve it. Sometimes that regulation works; sometimes it does not.

Not all 62 recommendations in the White Paper have been implemented. I think that everyone would agree that there are things that have been identified and worked on with the sector that need to be implemented, and implemented more quickly, so that the full package of actions that was determined as being necessary for better regulation of the sector is implemented. There is a cost to the sector from that, and a cost that often gets passed on to consumers.

I call Lee Dillon. It seems he is not here, so I call Cameron Thomas.

In the absence of my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon), I thank you, Sir Desmond. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard) for securing this important debate.

As a teenaged boy, every morning on my way to school I would stop off at the home of my friend M and we would walk the last few hundred metres to school together. We shared a number of classes, and every lunch time we would abscond back to his house to play video games. As we became adults, we enjoyed betting on weekend football accumulators as we watched the live scores come in, at the small cost of a few pounds.

As I came to spend fewer weekends with our friendship group, and gradually lost interest in betting, M continued to bet more consistently and with ever greater stakes. The rise in online gambling firms was followed by increasingly invasive advertising campaigns, not only on the shirts of the footballers he watched or on the hoardings of premier league football stadiums, but increasingly in his social media feeds. Everywhere M looked, there was a betting company chipping away at his judgment, enticing him to put money down.

Adverts showed groups of young men cheering at TV screens in packed bars. They did not show dark bedrooms dimly illuminated by computer monitors or mobile phones. They did not show vulnerable young men in despair, having lost a pay packet on the first weekend of the month. M was well into his 20s by the time he realised he was a problem gambler. By the time he had reached his 30s, family members were protecting his wages from his addiction. By the time he was 40, he had twice lost deposits he had been saving to buy a home.

There is a sensible and nuanced course of action to be charted here. People such as my friend M need action, but establishments such as Cheltenham Racecourse in my constituency of Tewkesbury must not be conflated with online betting companies. Cheltenham Racecourse’s 250,000 annual visitors generate £274 million for the Gloucestershire economy, but the Jockey Club, which operates the racecourse in my Tewkesbury constituency, generates a tiny fraction of the huge profits enjoyed by large online gambling companies.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank the hon. Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard) for securing this timely debate. It is interesting to hear different Members from across the House taking a stand on this issue. I listened with interest to my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell), who has bet365 in his constituency; he spoke about his need to make sure his residents have good jobs, but also about how to balance those harms. It is interesting to hear how we can move forward with that.

I welcome the Government’s Budget announcements increasing remote gaming duty and general betting duty as a way to tackle some of our more harmful forms of gambling, particularly in online gaming. That is something that the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform and many Members across this House have championed—it is a cross-party issue.

This move from the Chancellor goes some way towards addressing the many billions of pounds that gambling harm costs the public purse. The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities estimates that the public health costs of gambling in England alone are between £1 billion and £1.77 billion, but that figure captures only a subset of costs: it relies on self-reporting and the methodology does not include costs including secondary mental health services, alcohol and drug use, lost tax from employment and the cost of lives lost to gambling suicide.

Furthermore, the cost of gambling goes far beyond the individual themselves. For every person experiencing problem gambling, it is estimated that up to six others are affected—their families, children, employers and community members.

On the point about the effects going beyond the person experiencing problem gambling, I was contacted by my constituent Chloe Long, who tragically and heartbreakingly lost her brother to gambling-related suicide last year. In his case, the challenge was not the regulated gambling industry, as we have been discussing; he was doing all the right things in terms of self-excluding and signing up to GamStop, but was still able to access the black market sites. We have to think more creatively about how we can solve that problem. Does my hon. Friend agree that there must be much more awareness out there of just how severe the risks of gambling addiction can be and of the devastating effect it can have, not just on the people we lose through it, but on their families, children and friends for decades to come?

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Gambling has become ubiquitous in our society. It is endemic. We watch the television; we have online roulette in our pockets—it is everywhere. We must also be mindful of the black market as well as the legal gambling companies, and go after both with ferocity to make sure the harms are reduced.

Having established the need to recognise the public health costs of the most dangerous gambling products, we should review the taxation of other harmful forms of gambling, particularly the most dangerous category—the B3 machines in adult gaming centres. It is right that the duty paid by those machines is set at a higher rate. The Gambling Commission, which we have already heard about, must do more to ensure that licence conditions are followed by adult gaming centres. There are widespread reports of breaches of the rules, notably the 80/20 rule relating to the most harmful category of machine, and games that facilitate much higher stakes than is permitted in the licensing codes.

Let us be clear; gambling is highly profitable, and that profit cannot be separated from the harm inflicted. We have already heard this, but it is worth stating again: 60% of the industry’s profits come from 5% of customers who are either addicted or at risk.

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and for the excellent and knowledgeable speech she is making. One other important piece of context in all this is the men’s health strategy, which I know was widely welcomed across the House and was published two weeks ago, and which identified gambling harms as a key element that it needed to tackle. Most of us have welcomed the introduction of the remote gambling tax; that fits very well within the men’s health strategy, because it seeks to disincentivise the most harmful forms of gambling. Does she agree that, while the tax was very welcome, we need to make sure that the money coming in via the levy is as well spent as possible to tackle the harms caused by gambling?

Those are points very well made. Tackling gambling harms should be at the top of our public health priorities—I make a declaration of interest: I am a public health consultant—to ensure our country thrives economically as well as in health terms. The two are intertwined; we cannot separate them.

Gambling profit cannot be separated from the harm inflicted. In online gambling, 86% of profits come from the top 5% of customers. We have already heard from the hon. Member for Witney and others about the ubiquity of advertising. A recent report showed that the industry spends £2 billion a year on advertising—an astronomical sum that is fuelling a public health crisis in this country. Targeted digital marketing means that someone with a gambling problem is nine times more likely to be offered a so-called free bet, according to the Gambling Commission.

We need regulatory and legislative tools to tackle industry marketing practices, and we must make sure that children are protected from the proliferation of gambling ads, sponsorship and influencer marketing. As someone who has teenage children, I am only too aware that responsible mobile phone usage only goes so far; we must ensure that our children are protected from this insidious way of introducing people to gambling far too early and far too often. Gambling Commission statistics show that 1.2% of children experience problem gambling, and 3.4% of 11 to 17-year-olds are already being harmed by their gambling. That is astonishing and outrageous. Children should receive independent education about the dangers of gambling, and we must stop incentivising them to gamble through widespread advertising, both online and offline.

We cannot treat gambling as a harmless leisure activity when 14% of British adults are at risk of gambling harm and gambling-related suicides occur in their hundreds every year. Gambling is a matter of public health. I appreciate that it is overseen by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, but I think it should be overseen by the Department of Health and Social Care, with a legislative framework that is fit for purpose for the digital age.