Addiction: England and Wales

Lord Chadlington Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Chadlington (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, for introducing this debate. I acknowledge that he was remarkably supportive and helpful to me during my seven years as chairman of Action on Addiction. I should declare the interest that my daughter is head of public policy for Google.

Today, 8.3 million people are unable to pay off personal debts and almost 9 million households have less than £250 in savings. Around 95% of homes in the UK have TV sets, and this year the gambling industry will spend around £312 million on advertising, which is 63% up since 2012. This advertising is seductive and urgent, and it offers, as a recent study by Warwick University shows, very high odds against propositions which the viewer believes could easily happen.

Some 75% of Premier League teams have gambling promotions on shirts and on hoardings, and recent research suggests that 71% of league clubs are affiliated with young people’s clubs sponsored by gambling companies. If you have a debt and it is preying on your mind, and if you are at home relaxing and watching television and suddenly something comes up on the screen offering you 20:1, 30:1, 40:1 or 50:1, you will say to yourself, “I’ll just have a £10 bet. There’s nothing wrong with that and my problems will be solved”. As a top addiction therapist said recently, giving a child a smartphone is like “giving them a gram of cocaine”. When you gamble on your mobile, the gambling company has your details to market to you as it wishes. That is one reason why we have 2 million people with a potential gambling problem and over half a million people in treatment—an increase of 53% between 2012 and 2015. This weight of advertising normalises gambling. Online gambling games such as Robin of Sherwood Slot and Fortnite groom young people to learn how to gamble by using gambling-like features. Eight out of 10 people in Britain now believe that there are too many opportunities to gamble, and seven out of 10 regard gambling as dangerous to family life.

There are four trends that I want to highlight: personal debt; the promotion of gambling on television and so on; the use of mobile phones both for gambling and for the encouragement of gambling; and the effect of all that on young people—in my view it is contributing to the birth of a gambling epidemic.

There are five steps that I would ask the Government to consider. First, we urgently need independent research. It should be independently funded and look into all areas relating to advertising and promotion, particularly with regard to the young. Secondly, we must do as we did with tobacco in 1965 and stop all advertising and promotion of gambling on TV, particularly during live sporting events and an hour before and afterwards. We should look at what has happened in Australia and in Italy following a ban. Thirdly, we must protect our children by evaluating, and if necessary banning, all online games that encourage and groom young people to gamble. Fourthly, we must invest in helping those who are in danger of being addicted, or have become addicted, to gambling.

Finally, 1.4% of all gamblers become problem gamblers but an astonishing 11.5% of regular FOBT users become problem gamblers. We must implement the FOBT reduction now. Why are we waiting? The CEBR has produced a report that will be released tomorrow which points out a perfectly even spread as far as the Treasury is concerned. I would raise the levy on gambling companies from 0.1% to 1%, which would give us some £130 million a year to pay for all this work.

I come to my final point, and this is the worst thing of all. Gambling with Lives estimates on its website that some 500 young people—one every morning and one every afternoon of our working day—commit suicide in the United Kingdom with gambling contributing to their deaths. How many young people have to die before we act? I believe we will look back at gambling in the UK at the outset of the 21st century with the same bewilderment that we now look back at the mass advertising of tobacco or of alcohol, and we will wonder how it was possible for us all to sit on our hands.