Gambling Harms: Children and Young People

Ben Coleman Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of gambling harms on children and young people.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell, and to see so many people in the Chamber today for this important debate. I am very aware that the topic of gambling and the harms that it causes to children and young people is important to many Members of this House and many of our constituents. There have already been quite a number of debates on gambling in this Parliament, and I know that Select Committees have looked at it as well. I have talked to my constituents and to various people who have been campaigning against the harms caused by gambling, and we feel that there has been a gap when it comes to looking at the impact: a lot of attention has been paid to adults who are gambling, but there are also real impacts on children.

I pay tribute to hon. Members who have been taking a strong stand on gambling. My hon. Friend the Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) has been campaigning very hard on the impacts, and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) has been working tirelessly over the years. It is a cross-party concern, so it is really good to see lots of people here.

I want to say thank you to my constituent Lesley, who lost her son to gambling several years ago. She cannot be here today, because she is having surgery, but apparently she is watching the debate through one puffy eye. My heart goes out to Lesley and to everyone who has lost loved ones due to gambling. We lose something like 500 people a year in this country directly to gambling, through suicide. The impacts are massive.

What I really want to explore today, in relation to children and young people, is how we should look at gambling as a public health issue, and one that is of rising concern because of changes in the way people gamble. People are gambling with all sorts of new technologies, and the country is gambling with lives. The charity Gambling With Lives is here: it has supported me, other MPs and our constituents who have lost people, and I want to say a massive thank you for its support.

We also have Rosie here today, who lost her son a few years ago to gambling. When people have lost those who are dear to them, it is so brave that they are standing up and saying, “This has to stop, because it is needless.” Gambling is a normal human activity—but perfectly normal human activities such as eating, drinking and, frankly, having sex are things that we look at through a public health lens, because there are health consequences, and gambling needs to be treated in the same way.

With children and young people, it helps to look at the two broad ways in which they experience harms. People can experience harms from gambling directly. The number of people who engage with gambling at a very young age is shocking. Something that stood out to me was when I met a young person in his early 20s who is now a real advocate, particularly for the impacts of gambling on communities that face high levels of deprivation and poverty. He started gambling when he was seven and had a serious gambling addiction by the time he went to secondary school, which had massive impacts on his schooling, his education and his relationships as he was trying to learn how to handle his finances in life.

We all know that people should not be gambling when they are seven, and as parliamentarians we all know that the law says they should not be gambling when they are seven—but it is happening. That is partly because the nature of gambling in our society is changing, including the way people access it. It is not just that they are going to the old turf accountants or the bookies on the high street; there are many new, innovative ways in which people are accessing gambling. Although I welcome innovation, I do not welcome innovation where it causes harm.

We also need to look at how much gambling is happening online on people’s phones, and possibly at the interactions between the psychological mechanisms behind gambling and social media, because they have a lot in common. This room is full of politicians, and politicians may well doomscroll occasionally on social media—it is not unheard of. Lots of people in this room will know the feeling of scrolling through feeds on various social media platforms that I will not mention, at this point, and getting addicted. That is because various social media platforms have been engineered to hijack our dopamine chemistry and the reward centres in our brain—the stuff that we evolved so we could handle risky situations.

Gambling is a way of handling risk and turning risk into an activity that is pleasurable or exciting to a lot of people. We need to be able to handle risk, but people have hijacked it, just as some of the food companies and producers have frankly hijacked our appetites and driven us towards foods that drive up obesity. In the same way, alcohol companies can drive up drinking. I like alcohol, and none of this is a prohibitionist argument: it is an argument about regulation.

The second key issue is that, as well as being engaged in gambling, children are affected indirectly. I will address the direct harms first. Because people use social media, children have access to smartphones, meaning that the harm manifests in the same way as with adults who are gambling legally. They can access gambling 24/7 and are subjected to gambling advertisements and inducements to gamble at all times. That is what is happening to our children.

Although adverts are, in theory, targeted at adults, children are experiencing them, in the same way that they experience many other harms and things that we do not want them to see online. These adverts are designed to get into people’s heads and get them to engage in gambling, often at points in the evening when they are quite vulnerable. Adults are reporting that, because advertising and gambling companies have all this data on them, adverts are being targeted towards the late evening, when they may be on their own in their bedroom and feeling a bit tired. When their defences are down, that is when they see a little inducement to gamble. The same is happening to children.

We should be aware that the gambling industry spends about £2 billion on advertising in the United Kingdom. It is not spending that for nothing. We also know that, roughly speaking, the impacts of gambling on society cost about £1.7 billion. That is a soft figure, but it could well be a lot more; it is very hard to calculate the harms. The advertising industry is spending at least as much on advertising as the harm it is causing to our nation. That should give us pause for thought about the real impacts on our economy.

There is a lot of concern, not just over the accessibility of gambling and online slot games, but about the fact that many of them are marketed as games. I am a little bit old and I do not play computer games with loot boxes, but loot boxes are a form of gambling. This House has looked at them, and they are an inducement to gamble. Children are being exposed to the gamification of something that can cause harm.

We must look at gambling as a social activity that, for a very large number of people, is fatal. If we were looking at it as an illness, we would say that it had a high mortality rate. Of course, gambling addiction is an illness, and it does have a high mortality rate. That is why we need to look at it as a public health issue.

When children start as young as seven, they do not have the same defences as adults. There is increasing evidence that a person’s brain has higher levels of plasticity until their mid-20s, and that adolescents are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviours. At the same time that we want adolescents to start to learn responsibility in life, gambling is getting in and hijacking the development of people’s ability to handle their own finances and adult decisions, and it is sucking them into online games.

I am very concerned about that, but I am equally concerned about the effects on children when an adult in their household is gambling. There is a double effect. We all know that if a household has someone in it whose gambling is out of control and causing damage, that can have knock-on and ripple effects. For children, who are in a more vulnerable position, we know that emotional and psychological harms are caused by being in a household with someone who is gambling, because of the behaviours that the adult starts to express—the tension and anxiety that they may be going through, and the unhelpful lessons that they may be teaching that young child.

We also know that gambling, and financial distress generally, can lead to conflict within families. It can lead to tensions, to relationship breakdowns and—as situations like this so often do in families, and as too many of us know from our own experiences and those of our constituents—to a spiral of abuse and neglect. Gambling is a key driver of that. If our Government are really serious about bringing prevention to the fore in the health strategy, they need to identify risks and harms and intervene early. Gambling is among those risks and harms.

I do not think we can make our health strategy work without tackling gambling, because so many other things are tied in with it. Financial insecurity is a key driver of health problems and health inequalities, and gambling is a part of the puzzle that we need to address. Gambling can also lead to financial deprivation; if there is no money left, the children are going to suffer. We know that parents will often prioritise feeding their children ahead of themselves, but where the adult in the situation is a gambling addict, they are likely, unfortunately, to prioritise their gambling over their child. That is where there is a vulnerable, non-consenting child who needs extra support.

Those are the categories of harms, so we must think about what they mean in practice for children. What are the impacts? The harms are reflected in behavioural and physical changes in the children. It is obvious that there are physical changes as a result of being short of food, but there are also physical and behavioural effects of abuse and neglect that lead to longer-term impacts over a child’s whole life. They can impact a child’s ability to function well at school, and thereby impact educational attainment. They can impact the child’s expectations of life. They can reduce their life chances. They can also add to a lot of the problems that we are facing across the country, where we have people in families with multigenerational unemployment who have not learned the habit of working, and children who think that gambling may be the way to a prosperous life. That is a real impact, and it impacts on so many other parts of the Government’s missions.

We want to get people into work—into stable employment—but, if this is the environment that they are in, it can hamper that goal. My question to the Minister is, “If the companies that are playing these games—that are inducing harm and using the techniques of modern social media and modern online tools to get into people’s heads—are undermining the Government’s other missions, how are we going to act on that?” That is a really important question.

Gambling also has intergenerational effects, because children affected by it may become problem gamblers themselves. We are talking about large numbers of people: we think that 190,000 children in this country between the ages of 11 and 17 are affected by problem gambling. Nearly 25% of people who use online slot machines are engaged in problem gambling, and when we add it all up and include people who are at risk, it is about 40% of the total number of people who are gambling online. Those are large numbers of people in a growing and rapidly adapting market.

I would like to hear from the Minister about how the Government can move faster. We have seen challenges in the last few weeks with nudification tools, child abuse images and sexual abuse material appearing on mainstream social media because of the adaptability of artificial intelligence tools and their ability to move really fast. The tech companies are—as we want them to—innovating and developing things quickly, so the Government need to change their pace of action as well. I think we are a bit too slow on this issue.

[Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing the debate. Gambling is one of the most pernicious public health issues of our times, as we have said on the Health and Social Care Committee. It has to be seen as a public health issue. Children who are bombarded with gambling ads on social media and who are learning to see betting as a normal part of the environment are just being exploited by adults. They have undeveloped risk judgment and undeveloped impulse control. We have a generation being primed for addiction.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government should do a number of things: ban gambling ads on platforms accessible to minors, prohibit influencer promotions, enforce harsh penalties on violators, mandate addiction warnings, require robust age verification and fund prevention programmes? In short, does he agree that it is time for the Government to see this as a public health issue and get tough with the simply gross adults behind this online exploitation, who are damaging our children and their future?

[Kevin McKenna]

My hon. Friend is very knowledgeable about this subject, and he is bang on about all those actions. It is exactly that: gambling has to be treated as a public health issue. I would endorse all those actions. The key thing is that we look to regulate alcohol, junk food and all such items because we know that they cause risk and cost us all money; if they are increasing demand on the NHS, they are costing us money. Who is paying for that? At the moment, it is not the gambling firms, which are externalising the costs of their business on the rest of us, and causing harm in society.

I really endorse what my hon. Friend said; we need to treat gambling as a risk, in the same way that we treat smoking, air pollution and drinking, and we need to manage it. That needs to be the lens through which the Government look at gambling, particularly when we consider children, who, of course, are different participants in society, economically. They are in a more vulnerable position, and they are our future. I entirely endorse that intervention, which leads me on to some key things.

I know that many of my hon. Friends want to speak and have some key points to make, but I need to reiterate that, at a fundamental level, this is not about banning gambling; it is about managing the harms caused by gambling. I represent a seaside constituency that has a dog track and seaside slot arcades. Those are things that we can manage, and they are in places we would expect to see such things. However, we know that, as gambling starts to move into new areas, that brings in new risks. That is why the fact that some of those things are moving away from seaside areas, where they can be controlled and people are used to regulating them, is a really important issue. I am not asking for us to ban them; I am asking for us to regulate, and to treat gambling harms as a public health emergency, which is what I believe they are developing into, because the tech is moving so fast.

I see my hon. Friend the Member for Brent East has taken her place.

High Street Gambling Reform

Ben Coleman Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) for securing this important debate. Gambling is a subject that the Health and Social Care Committee has looked at in some detail, and it is clear from what I have heard from witnesses, from talking to the National Gambling Clinic—it is in my constituency—and from walking round our local high streets talking to people I know, that high streets remain at the heart of the gambling harm being caused in our country and localities, particularly in our most disadvantaged and poorest communities.

As we have heard, when the Gambling Act 2005 abolished the so-called “demand” test, and replaced it with the “aim to permit”, it removed the requirement to prove local need before opening a betting shop, and opened the door to a wild-west clustering of betting shops in poorer areas. That does devastating damage to individuals, families and communities, because residents in streets where every third or fourth shop can be a gambling den with cups of tea, face constant exposure to gambling during routine activities. They could be shopping for groceries, taking kids to school or commuting for work, and there is a gambling premises. Gambling becomes normalised. It is like a regular part of daily life, rather than activity that, as we know, requires caution. For those vulnerable to addiction, it makes avoidance nearly impossible and relapse inevitable, and the financial consequences can be catastrophic.

Lower-income families, and people who earn far less or live on benefits, have no buffers to absorb that sort of loss. What might be manageable for someone with savings becomes ruinous for someone living from pay cheque to pay cheque. We are talking about people who cannot pay their rent, or whose bills are going unpaid and whose children are going without. The toll on mental health is huge. Indeed, it is immense: depression, anxiety, shame, and isolation. As we have heard, we cannot necessarily see a problem gambler. We may be able to see a problem drunk, but a problem gambler hides their addiction from loved ones—that was one of the points made strongly to me when I visited the National Gambling Clinic in Earl’s Court. The stress that someone is already under is compounded by the gambling, and those mental health stresses may already be more prevalent in depressed or deprived areas, where housing is less adequate and people face other stresses and challenges on a daily basis.

We have heard about the redoubtable charity Gambling with Lives, to which I pay tribute. There is no doubt in my mind that the gambling industry and its lobbyists are often, in their behaviour, simply thugs. People such as the wonderful Ritchies—who set up Gambling with Lives after losing their son, and who brought a constituent to see me who talked about his own son losing his life to gambling—are still ploughing away and fighting their fight, and they have been inspirational for all Members of the House who have met them. They made me and the Health and Social Care Committee aware that there are between 117 and 496 gambling-related suicides every year. Having taken evidence, we thought that, although wide, that data was strong enough to place in our report so that it is on the public record. Gambling does not just tear families apart, it also takes lives away, and we must remember that.

We must also look at the community impact of allowing the clustering of betting shops since the law changed in 2005. That clustering drives out family businesses and community services, and it feeds neighbourhood decline. Hammersmith and Fulham council tried to do something about it. We have a high concentration of betting shops, especially in deprived neighbourhoods. North End Road in Fulham has been identified as a gambling vulnerability zone, and there are two council estates nearby, which are in the bottom decile for deprivation, employment and income.

That is not a coincidence, because higher levels of deprivation and the clustering of gambling premises go together. North End Road in the heart of Fulham is one of three hotspots in the borough. The council is doing its best to act responsibility within the national framework, and it is consulting on a local plan. Residents are keen for it to do that, and in the most vulnerable areas there will be a presumption to refuse, but in the end it cannot refuse premises because the law still constrains it, in a way that is out of kilter with alcohol and other licensing.

The Health and Social Care Committee welcome the fact that the Government have reframed this issue as a public health crisis. We have called for local authorities to have a key role in gambling licensing and for directors of public health to be made a responsible authority when it comes to gambling planning and licensing applications. We need reform of the legislation governing high street gambling, and we need it now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this important debate, and to the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) for bringing it forward. Before I turn to some of the specifics of the case she made, I remind the House that the vast majority of people who gamble do so responsibly, safely and without risk of harm. Indeed, some of our annual events in this country are associated with gambling and form part of our national identity. I am thinking in particular of the grand national. Indeed, the first time I ever placed a bet was on a horse called Party Politics. It probably led to an interest in something different from gambling, but that is another matter.

The Government’s own figures show that problem gambling affects around 0.4% of adults. That figure has remained broadly stable for many years. Meanwhile, 22 million people gamble every month without harm. Gambling harms exist, of course, and I sat through oral evidence on that issue in the Health and Social Care Committee in April last year. We have heard some of the most powerful testimony from the hon. Member about real lives that have been harmed because of gambling. Problem gambling can ruin relationships, destroy mental and physical health and, in the worst cases, end lives. The number of gambling-related deaths is far outnumbered by alcohol-specific deaths or alcohol-related deaths, but any life lost and any life destroyed is a tragedy.

We must do more to support people with gambling addictions and crack down on illegal gambling and lawbreaking. However, policy must be based on evidence. Betting shops are among the most heavily regulated retail premises. They have strict age verification requirements, limits on gaming machines, trained staff and formal self-exclusion schemes. Those protections only apply when people gamble in licensed premises. They do not exist in the same way at home and not at all on the black market. We should not assume that further reducing the number of high street betting shops will reduce problem gambling.

When it comes to high street betting shops, research by ESA Retail found that 89% of betting shop customers combine their visit with trips to other local businesses, thereby supporting the high street. Betting shops support around 46,000 jobs, contributing nearly £1 billion a year in direct tax to the Treasury and a further £60 million in business rates to local councils. We have heard how betting shops have spread uncontrollably in some areas, but nationally betting shops are closing. Since 2019, the number of licensed betting shops has fallen by 30%, from more than 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Thousands of jobs have already been lost as a result, and many more are now at risk following the tax rises announced in the Budget.

[Ben Coleman]

The hon. Member talks about the amount of money raised in tax from gambling companies. Can he also give us the figures for the amount of money that the NHS has to spend each year on the mental health issues and other problems that arise from gambling addiction?

[Joe Robertson]

I think the hon. Member himself agrees that this is not about stopping people gambling. The point I am making is that high street premises represent some of the safer environments for gambling, and some of the riskier forms of gambling are far less visible than the high street shops we have heard about today. I am certainly not minimising in any way the effects of problem gambling and some of those involved in the industry, particularly on the black market.

While the Budget did not directly target betting shops, many operators run integrated online and retail businesses. With online gambling duty doubling and sports betting duty rising by nearly 70%, the UK will have one of the highest tax rates on gambling in the world.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Brent East for talking about local empowerment. I think her key point—the heart of her argument—was about empowering local communities and local councils to be able to exercise greater control over high street premises. I want to raise a specific issue that shows how confused the system has become, and which is related to her argument.

Recently, Chesterfield borough council allowed an adult gaming centre to introduce betting facilities without a formal change of planning use, on the basis that betting was considered ancillary. This shows that the council was effectively able to bypass planning laws, and to create confusion and inconsistency in how planning and gambling laws are applied, which is deeply worrying. Betting shops and adult gaming centres are fundamentally different types of premises; they are regulated differently and treated separately in planning law, for good reason. Allowing betting facilities to be introduced into adult gaming centres without proper scrutiny risks creating a back-door route for betting operations to open without local consent or oversight. We support the sentiment behind the argument made by the hon. Member for Brent East: local communities and local councils should be better empowered to make decisions for their high streets.

I want to finish by asking the Minister four questions. First, will the Government act to close the planning loophole that allows adult gaming centres to introduce betting facilities without a proper change of use? Secondly, what assessment has been made of the impact of recent tax rises on high street betting shops, including closures, job losses and empty units, and will it be published? Thirdly, what concrete action is being taken to tackle illegal gambling, and particularly operators that target people who have self-excluded from licensed betting shops? Finally, the Government wrote to the Health and Social Care Committee on 12 June last year and said that they would look to complement local authorities’ existing powers in relation to the licensing of gambling premises. Does the Minister have an update?

Gambling Harms

Ben Coleman Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alex Ballinger]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, and I wholeheartedly agree. Many European countries, as well as Australia, have put forward much stronger restrictions on gambling advertising, and it is very important for the protection of our children that we follow suit.

It is also the same on social media: on X—formerly known as Twitter—alone, there are now 1 million gambling adverts every year. The industry is clearly doubling down on this approach as it spends £1.5 billion a year on gambling advertising in the UK. While the gambling industry sometimes attempts to frame advertising and marketing as having no connection to harm, there is ample evidence that the marketing increases the use of the most harmful forms of gambling. Online incentivisation schemes, including VIP schemes, bonuses and free spins, are evidence that gambling companies think marketing gets people to gamble in their most profitable and harmful sectors.

Advertising and the exposure to gambling cues are the No. 1 issue for patients who access NHS gambling services, and 87% of people with a gambling disorder said that marketing and advertising prompted them to gamble when they otherwise were not going to. I spoke earlier of Ben, who was contacted more than once a day in the months leading up to his death. That level of contact and pressure must be addressed; it is simply unethical and puts gambling profits above the lives of our young people.

[Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)]

I also had a deeply moving meeting last week with a constituent whose son, aged just 19, had tragically taken his own life, having become addicted to online gambling after six months of the same sort of advertising pressure my hon. Friend described. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is time for all parts of Government to acknowledge that problem gambling has become a public health emergency, that it is not enough for gambling to be left to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport alone to regulate and that it is time to stop listening to gambling operators’ siren voices?

[Alex Ballinger]

I agree that the time to act is now—we need stronger regulations and stronger presence of the health system in our response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Coleman]

On people appearing to be one thing and actually being something else, does the hon. Member agree that 100% of the gambling levy should be given to independent bodies that are answerable to Ministers and Parliament, not to charities backed by gambling companies?

[Max Wilkinson]

Absolutely. There is a role for a separate levy as well, which I will come to later, to support the horseracing industry, which needs to be viewed separately from the rest of this, as I said.

The Government must also think about the broadcasters who screen games and run their own associated betting operations, because the gap between the scenarios portrayed in gambling adverts and the reality is nothing short of sinister. In gambling adverts, people are having a great time in the pub with their mates. They are in fun scenarios, playing roulette, wearing sharp suits or sparkly dresses, with dancing and jolly times being had by all. In reality, such gambling is, in the main, far from a social occasion. It is undertaken mostly by people who are addicted to gambling apps, losing money at home alone, often desperate and with nobody to talk to.