Young People: Gambling Harm

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for tabling this debate on reducing gambling harm among young people. That sounds admirable but, hot on the heels of the Academy of Ideas World Cup sweepstake, organised by one of our young team, Jake Weston, an enthusiastic gambler himself, I want to appeal for perspective.

As a reminder, for the vast majority of people across all age groups, gambling is harmless. As Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has noted, it can bring joy to millions of people who enjoy a regular flutter. So many get their pleasure from honing their skills in working out—and hopefully beating—the odds. Others just enjoy the thrill and challenge of taking a risk, often the sorts of instincts we want to encourage, for example in would-be entrepreneurs. Yet too often in debates in this Chamber, we discuss this legal, legitimate leisure activity as though it inevitably leads to ruin. It is unfairly characterised as toxic and pathologised as addictive, a threatening destroyer of individuals and family life.

I thought of all this when watching a lovely clip of the football icon Kevin Keegan—in my opinion, the real king of the north—from a filmed interview doing the rounds since his sad death. Kevin movingly recalled how his dad used to back the horses regularly, just like most miners at the time. One year, he won a few quid on the Grand National and used all the money to buy his young, football-obsessed son some second-hand football boots, an act of fatherly love and generosity paid for by his hobby and not some sordid, dodgy, selfish activity. Will the Minister reassure us that the Government will avoid policies that purport to protect the young but, in reality, are a puritan Trojan horse for a prohibition that unfairly demonises gambling per se?

Do not get me wrong, I know from personal experience how out-of-control gambling can bring misery, but we need to be honest that this is a small minority. Acknowledging this will allow for bespoke policies that target real problems, rather than a blanket culture of disapproval or a catch-all of ineffective, excessive state intervention into people’s private choices.

We also need to interrogate some of the data and terminology that can misleadingly suggest that this is a growing problem. We are not helped by the fact that there is no single dataset that measures problem gambling among young people. There is not even clarity about our definition of young people. In gambling-related law, “young people” can refer to adults between the ages of 18 and 25, who can legally gamble with licensed operators but with age-targeted restrictions. Then there are under-18s, defined as children, who are prohibited from gambling in that way. This can be confusing—for example, having two categories of adult of 18 to 24 year-olds and 25 year-olds and over. Apart from anything else, are we in danger of infantilising young adults, who we otherwise expect to be responsible grown-ups? The prospect of 16 year-olds being considered adult enough to vote will not help this muddle. Unfortunately, too many commentators in gambling have developed the bad habit of using the phrase “young people” to cover both the under-18 and the under-25 categories.

Regardless, what does the data show? The NHS’s Health Survey of England, which confusingly uses the age range of 16 to 24, shows that problem gambling rates fell from 1% in 2018 to 0.5% in 2024. So why is this age group a focus of special concern? Are we really worried about gambling by children, given that it is stated as fact that 80,000 children suffer from gambling harms? But that number is extrapolated from 25 schoolchildren—yes, 25—who were classified as problem gamblers in the Young People and Gambling Survey 2023. To note, “harm” is classified at a hugely lower threshold than for post-18s, so what has been labelled harmful gambling—it has been described as “addiction” here—for those 25 children should make us pause before we panic. Two-thirds self-report playing amusement games such as crane grabs at seaside arcades—shock horror. Half are called problem gamblers because they place bets with friends and family, and 40% play cards with mates and siblings or occasionally buy lottery products such as scratch cards. What constitutes illegal gambling for children is even more banal. If kids bet using pocket money or school lunch money, it is against the law, even if it is spent on forms of gambling that are legal.

Counterintuitively, even the pantomime villain of online gambling has one of the lowest rates of participation in this age group. As an antidote to those who are oversimplistic on the stats, children gambling online are largely getting access from their adult parents, who are allowing their children to use their online gambling accounts. To conclude, let us tell the kids some home truths about the pitfalls of gambling, but let us not scaremonger them or ourselves in this House.