Gambling companies made £13.9 billion last year. It’s time they started paying some of it back.
Why we need a gambling levy
I spent a lot of yesterday on drive time radio shows, talking about the two big stories of the day. They were both about gambling.
Early this morning the Daily Mail broke the news that:
55,000 children age 11 to 16 have serious problems with gambling and that 450,000 more are betting an average £16 a week.
And in the afternoon:
online betting giant Bet365 announced that their revenue had gone up to £2.9bn and their chief executive had paid herself £265m last year.
People care
When you do live radio, you normally spend a minute or two talking with the producer before you’re put on air. Almost every producer yesterday told me they were flooded with calls. As I joined these programmes, I heard people across the country saying how angry, upset and frustrated they were.
They were sick of back-to-back gambling adverts, worried about their children and clear that something has gone very wrong. This is not the kind of country we want to be. The top voted comments on the Mail’s website were typical of the conversations I heard:
The consensus seems to be that something must be done. But what? And how do we get politicians to act?
This is big
We’ll get to solutions in a minute. But first let’s zoom right out to the scale of the issue here.
The research published today showed how widespread gambling problems are for children. The Church was quick to say these were “deeply concerning” and the bishop of St Albans called them a “generational scandal”. What happens when these children become adults, people were asking.
It’s right to worry about the future. But what got less attention was the danger that hidden or secret debts create for young people today. We see time and again in our child protection work that owing money to a dealer or someone in a gang can force young people into serious danger and exploitation. That should be a concern here.
The scale of gambling problems for children came as a surprise. But we should have been prepared. Problem gambling for adults has been rising dramatically: on the latest count in 2016, more than 430,000 people had a serious problem, and and another 2 million were at risk of developing one.
Our research at Addaction also reveals there are big crossovers between problem gambling and other issues: 43 per cent of people with a gambling problem also had a problem with alcohol and 60 per cent experienced anxiety and depression.
No-one really knows what has caused this. There just isn’t the money for research, so even the experts are relying on intuition and anecdote. But the consensus seems to be that deregulation followed by an explosion in online and app related betting, driven by high profile advertising and sophisticated targeting is at the core. Here’s a typical article.
We also know that gambling is often a hidden problem. It’s a vicious cycle, in which people can become desperate to dig themselves out of a hole, only to find themselves further in. We hear stories all the time of people who have lost their homes, mental health, jobs, relationships and more as gambling problems deepened horrifyingly quickly. Debts can mount fast and people often seek help late, if at all.
Once they do seek help, it’s not easy to get treatment. You have a much better chance of getting help with mental health, alcohol or drugs than you do with gambling. The only organisation that gets substantial funding in the UK to deliver treatment says in it’s annual report that:
treatment services … reach less than 2% of the prevalent problem gambling population
It’s hardly a surprise we have a such a big problem.
We don’t need public money to solve this
The traditional response of Government to issues like gambling has been to dig deep into taxpayers pockets and stump up cash for prevention and treatment. Last year alone, HM Treasury spent far more than £500m on support for people with drug and alcohol issues. This is a lot and it makes sense to do: for every pound spent, three to four pounds are saved in other public services and wider social return, and many people and families are together, better and healthier as a result.
For gambling, we don’t need to look to taxpayers. This is an industry that has been making extraordinary amounts of money in recent years. The latest estimates are that:
The total gross gambling yield (GGY) of the Great Britain gambling industry was £13,900,000,000.
(This is the money gambling companies take in, less the amount they pay out, with some small adjustments. It’s a half-way decent indicator of gambling industry profit.)
And yet the industry gives less than 0.1 per cent of that yield to treatment: just £8m. It should be no surprise that people can’t get help.
It’s time for action
We have argued for a long time that the Government needs to put a formal levy on the industry to raise funds for treatment, and that this should be distributed without favour or prejudice by a truly independent body.
It’s a model that works in other countries like New Zealand for gambling, is working today in Britain for debt and would work for alcohol too. And it would change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and their families.
Here’s a slide that gives some numbers:
We were pleased last year that Labour adopted a gambling levy as their policy. (It was nice to for us to get a namecheck too, as this was announced.) But it’s genuinely hard to understand why other political parties haven’t adopted it.
A levy would be popular, simple and solve a genuine problem people care about. It’s even quite simple to do in a jam packed parliament: the primary legislation is in place and just needs the Secretary of State to activate it. Technically, MPs don’t even need to vote to make it law.
With that in mind, we are currently writing to every MP to see whether they’d back a levy and will let you know what they say. If you want to let your MP know what you think, here’s how to write to them.
There are a lot of other good ideas that would make a difference too: Make it harder to use a credit card to place bets; make it easier to self-exclude; place curbs on advertising; and (thankfully, at last) restrict stakes on fixed odds betting terminals.
But as the comment on the Daily Mail article above said, “you can’t ban everything.” And we shouldn’t want to, people need to be able to choose their own paths, make mistakes, learn and grow. That’s what life is. In any area like this we should start with how people really are and what matters to them.
But without significant investment in information and treatment, in practical reality we’ll always be scratching the surface.
