Gambling Harms: Children and Young People

Alex Ballinger Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Alex Ballinger (Halesowen) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) for delivering an excellent speech that covered many of the issues on which many of us in the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform have been campaigning. I also thank him for organising this debate, as it is really important to focus on young people.

Like many in this room, I am a member of that all-party parliamentary group, and we are particularly concerned about the harms that gambling causes to people across the board. I put on record my thanks to the Government for listening to our campaign on gambling taxation, through which we have raised additional money from the most harmful forms of gambling: addictive online slots and casinos. We are protecting people by incentivising gambling companies not to work in those areas.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey mentioned, the scale of gambling harm in the country is enormous. He talked about how 2.7% of the population suffers from gambling harm, but I find the figure among young people most striking: it is 10.2% for those under the age of 25. Some 70,000 children under the age of 18 face serious gambling harms, including addiction, debt and mental health problems. We are certainly priming people in the next generation to get into even more trouble when they reach the legal age at which they are able to gamble properly.

I want to talk about gambling advertising in particular. The all-party group recently had an inquiry on the subject, on the back of which we have written to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the gambling Minister. I want to highlight some of the things that we pulled out from that inquiry, particularly the effect that gambling advertising has on children and young people. Whether it is through social media, sport or even gaming, we are particularly concerned about the way in which such advertising normalises gambling among people under 18. People of that age, who are not even legally able to participate in gambling, are being bombarded by adverts across the board.

There is loads of research on this issue, and a lot of it points to the fact that many gambling adverts target boys rather than girls, and they are much more likely to receive them. The University of Liverpool highlighted a really high incidence of new cases of problem gambling particularly among boys and young men between the ages of 17 and 20. In fact, 57% of boys under the age of 18 have seen gambling adverts at sport events in the last year. The University of Bristol found that, in just the opening weekend of the premier league alone, there were 27,000 gambling adverts or inducements.

Football is of course a family sport, and lots of people of all ages go. We have to ask ourselves: do we think it is acceptable that children—whether they are going with their parents, going alone or watching it on television—are subject to so many gambling adverts? We have talked about the voluntary industry measures that have been put in place, including the front-of-shirt ban that is planned to be introduced later this year. Obviously, that is a step in the right direction, but it is just a drop in the ocean compared with the number of gambling adverts that we see in a typical football match.

Social media is also an enormous problem—53% of boys have seen gambling adverts on social media. Of course, we are debating whether people under 16 should even be able to access social media, but one of the reasons against it is the amount of harmful content to which they are exposed, and gambling adverts are one such example. Particularly concerning is the fact that 31% of children who have been exposed to gambling adverts have seen them through influencers. These people are not typically talking about doing paid adverts or showing themselves as gambling advertisers; they are simply influencers talking about the ways in which people can access gambling products online.

There is a real problem in the self-regulation of content marketing. The Advertising Standards Authority has a Committee of Advertising Practice code of practice that requires gambling marketing communications to be clearly identifiable as such, but again and again, we are not seeing that followed. In fact, 74% of gambling ads on social media were found not to follow that basic rule, which is seriously concerning.

As we have spoken about, gaming is a real challenge—37% of young people who use games have been exposed to gambling-related marketing. Games are designed with the same psychological elements that we might see in gambling, as they target dopamine and encourage people to take that chance of an opportunity to win. Having elements of gambling and actual gambling in computer games means that we are priming children to get involved in dangerous types of gambling in future. Influencers on platforms like Twitch are using opportunities to promote gambling and talking about it, which is very concerning.

Recent research by the academic Leon Xiao, who has provided advice to DCMS, found that 26% of games offered loot boxes that are illegal under current interpretations of gambling law. There is a real lack of enforcement and a lot of people are operating in this grey area, providing things that, under many interpretations of the law, are not legal. I have not even talked about the opportunities available to children to access the unregulated gambling market or to use crypto, or the many other dangerous types of gambling.

It is clear from talking to the many MPs engaged on this issue that the public are tired of this. Some 74% of people polled think that there are too many gambling adverts in sports and that under-18s should not be exposed to gambling advertising at all. That is a position that many of us can agree with. It seems completely reasonable considering the scale of harm that we are seeing.

A lot of the current situation stems from the fact that the Gambling Act was established in 2005 and we have not had primary legislation since then, while the world has changed completely. Many Members have talked about digitisation and smart phones, and how 24/7 online casinos have made things more difficult. We need to change the Act, but the Government could do a lot of things right now that would not require primary legislation, including effective regulation on advertising, marketing and sponsorship. That can already be done by the Gambling Commission and the Advertising Standards Authority.

Many other European countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium, have much stronger advertising restrictions than the UK. I urge the Minister to look at what lessons we might learn from other countries. I also ask him about the Betting and Gaming Council’s report on gambling advertising, which I understand was commissioned by the Government and informs their policy at the moment. Does he agree that asking the BGC to mark its own homework in that way is problematic? Will the Government commit to publishing the findings from that report so that we can all see what advice the Government are getting from the sector?

The evidence is clear. The public are tired of gambling adverts—that much is obvious. I urge the Government to heed the report of the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform, which will include proposals on limiting the most harmful forms of advertising, particularly as it affects young people. I will not pre-empt the report, which will be coming soon, but it will include lots of sensible steps that we can take on restrictions. It is important that we do not let outdated regulations allow more children to slip through the net and be primed for gambling harm in the future.