Gambling Harms: Children and Young People

Kevin McKenna 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.

[Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and is giving an excellent speech. It is not about banning gambling; it is about safeguarding. There are companies that are grooming children now to get them addicted to gambling. That is why we have to tackle gambling harms, not just online, but on our high streets. That is why my campaign to remove “aim to permit” from the Gambling Act 2005 is so important. Does he agree that this is all very much connected?

[Kevin McKenna]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend; this is all very much interconnected. She used the terminology “grooming”; those psychology-based behaviours really are a form of grooming and manipulation. I also think it would help to start thinking about the effect of secondary gambling on people, in the same way that we think about secondary smoking. Passive smoking became a very big concern; I do not want to call it “passive gambling”, but the secondary effects of gambling need to be taken as seriously as its direct effects.

What are the Government doing in terms of regulating gambling as a public health issue? That is a key question for the Minister. I really welcome the changes to the gambling levy, and I particularly welcome the fact that it is targeted at children in poverty; the money is being used to offset the harm, socially, that is directly caused by gambling.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) said, we also need to regulate gambling advertising, so how are the Government ensuring that gambling advertising regulations keep pace with the change in modern digital technologies, especially social media and pop-up ads? What steps are the Government taking to protect children and young people from gambling-related harm through the course of their whole lives?

While it is grabbing children while they are young—sometimes leading to the worst outcomes of all, with children killing themselves young—it is also affecting them as they move into adulthood and employment. Unfortunately, because once someone has this addiction it is very hard to move beyond it, even with a lot of intervention, many of those people then die in their adulthood; but the harm started earlier. I would really like to hear from the Minister on that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin McKenna]

I thank every Member who has contributed to this debate. It has been very powerful, and I have valued the detail that people have added; many are key bits of evidence that build up to show the threat that gambling represents to children and young people in this country. I particularly commend my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) and the work that the APPG on gambling reform does. That work was important in preparing my understanding of the problem before this debate, as was the great work done by the Health and Social Care Committee. It was good to hear some members of that Committee contributing today. This debate has shown how profoundly this issue has affected people and how rapidly it is changing.

I thank the Minister for his reply, particularly his commitment to research. It is really important—the only thing I would add is that we have to move fast. As someone from a health background, who has been involved in many health studies, I know that they can move too slowly. We are on rapidly shifting ground, so there are we need to take. While his Department does sterling work on this, I reiterate my feeling that, as always, health should be the principal lens through which we look at this issue. I thank the Chair, and everyone who has contributed to the debate.

Question put and agreed to. 

Resolved,  

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