Gambling Harms

Jim Dickson Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alex Ballinger]

I am delighted that the right hon. Member raises this important point, and I agree with him wholeheartedly; I will come on to the levy in a moment.

The public, too, are concerned about gambling advertising, with opinion polls consistently showing most people in the UK want a clampdown. As we have heard, we fall well behind other countries, with the Netherlands, Italy and Spain all having almost full bans on gambling advertising and sponsorship. We can clearly see that the boom in online gambling and huge rise in advertising and marketing is leading to an increase in gambling harms.

That leads me on to the legislation, which is in urgent need of an update. The last time primary gambling legislation was put forward was the Gambling Act 2005, which established the Gambling Commission, with the primary aims of preventing gambling from being a source of crime or disorder, ensuring that it was conducted fairly and openly, and protecting children and vulnerable people from being harmed or exploited by gambling companies. The Act was delivered before the rise of online gambling and before smartphones even existed; it is an analogue Act in a digital age and has long been in need of an update.

However, I was pleased to see the statutory levy introduced last week by the Government, which will generate £100 million from gambling operators to fund the research, prevention and treatment of gambling harms —without a doubt, an important step in ensuring that the industry begins to pay for the harm it causes. While the changes to the levy are welcome, however, we lack clarity on where the money raised through the levy will go on prevention. It is important that prevention commissioning is undertaken independently of the gambling industry. We cannot expect people to access services commissioned by the industry that they have been harmed or exploited by.

[Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has just spoken about the levy, which is a big step forward. Does he agree that prevention needs to focus on people who are at immediate risk but also, more widely, on our education system and services for young people?

[Alex Ballinger]

Yes, I agree that it is important that prevention should work across the piece, but I think it is more important to reduce the ubiquity of advertising that our young people are exposed to. They do not need to learn too young about gambling, and prevention should take that into account.

As I said, the changes to the levy are welcome, but we lack clarity on where the money that is raised will go with regard to prevention. It is important that the prevention commissioner be from the Department of Health and Social Care, given the synergy between the role and the Department’s current expertise in the delivery of similar services.

The introduction of the levy is a good first step, but it is just that—a first step. Two decades on from the Gambling Act, further action is needed to protect individuals and families from harm. I am thinking of the families of Ben and Jack and the thousands of others who have lost someone to gambling-related suicide, as well as the more than 1 million people who are experiencing gambling harms right now.

I am a member of the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform, working with Members from both sides of the House to minimise the harms from gambling—I am pleased to see so many of them present. I will highlight to the Minister some of the proposals on which the group has been working.

I ask the Minister to continue to monitor and regularly review the statutory levy on gambling operators. As I mentioned, it is important that the levy should commission preventive work independent of the gambling industry. I ask that mandatory affordability checks be implemented, which would help to prevent individuals from gambling beyond their means by identifying those at risk of financial harm and providing timely interventions.

I ask the Minister to commit to properly investigating every gambling-related suicide. Families such as Ben’s and Jack’s deserve each of these tragedies to be fully examined to understand the underlying causes and to develop better strategies for prevention. I would encourage the introduction of a gambling ombudsman to deal with disputes and provide appropriate redress where a customer suffered harm due to the operator’s social responsibility failure.

I would strongly push for greater restrictions on gambling advertising, sponsorship and inducements. We need to stop the practices that encourage children to gamble and that create unavoidable risks for the more than 1 million adults who are already suffering harms from gambling. Many of these challenges can be addressed by reviewing the 2005 Act in the light of the huge technological developments that have happened over the last two decades. That would allow us to follow through on the Labour party’s manifesto commitment to reduce gambling harms.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) for securing this important debate and for his insightful opening speech. I am conscious that we do not have a huge amount of time, so I will focus on a small number of points.

In 2023, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities published its latest report on the economic and social cost of the harms associated with gambling. It identified that 1.76 million people participate in harmful gambling in England, of whom 168,000 are classified as experiencing problem gambling. Those figures are enormous. GambleAware estimates that in Dartford, the community I am privileged to represent in this place, one in 33 people have a problem gambling severity index score of 8-plus. In layman’s terms, that means that they have experienced adverse consequences from gambling and may have lost control over their behaviour.

Like other Labour Members, I was elected on a manifesto committing us to reducing gambling-related harm, and I very much welcome the progress that we are making. The statutory levy and slot stake limits are both impressive steps forward, but there are still a few areas in which I—and other Members, I am sure—have identified the need for Government action.

First, as a football fan, I am pleased that the Premier League will ban front-of-shirt advertising by gambling companies from the summer of 2026, but anyone who regularly watches or attends matches will know that that is not enough. We need to go further and ban all shirt advertising, as well as perimeter advertising, and other sports need to follow that lead.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, we need to reform how coroners look at the role of problem gambling, because many bereaved families have felt that problems with gambling were simply excluded from consideration. I support calls for the Government to look at how they might reform the coroner service to ensure that the causes of preventable deaths, such as those linked with gambling, are properly examined and addressed to prevent future deaths. Importantly, the evidence submitted by families must be properly interrogated.

I pay tribute to all organisations involved in reducing gambling harm, but particularly Gambling with Lives, which has put families bereaved by gambling suicide at the heart of its work.