Gambling: Addiction

Lord Chadlington Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chadlington (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the right reverend Prelates the Bishop of St Albans and the Bishop of Portsmouth for initiating and introducing this debate. I also look forward to co-hosting on 20 November the seminars to which the right reverend Prelate referred.

It is not the absolute numbers of those hospitalised that led to my Question, but the fact that the trend is so clearly and inexorably upwards—as is gambling advertising spend, as is the number of problem gamblers, as is the number of young people playing gambling games that groom them to gamble, and as is the number of people taking their lives where gambling is either a comorbidity factor or the single factor. It is no longer enough to recite a litany of statistics that are all well known in your Lordship’s House. We must be more practical. So the question is: what can be done to reduce the number of problem gamblers who are hospitalised? Here is a proposal.

Yesterday I was privileged to take the Secretary of State for Health to the National Problem Gambling Clinic in London, the only dedicated NHS gambling clinic in the United Kingdom. The Health Secretary could see first-hand the professional work and pastoral care that the clinic has been undertaking for the last 10 years in treating some 5,000 patients, over 90% of whom were self-referrals. Although we do not have a geographical breakdown of the hospitalisation analysis to which the QSD refers, we have enough reliable research to identify the key areas in the UK where problem gambling is most rife. Sadly, as I have commented before, they are often the most deprived areas of the country.

Each gambling clinic requires funding of, broadly speaking, £500,000 a year. We could establish 10 or even 20 of these centres in those key areas of the UK where we know there is an intense gambling problem. It would cost us upwards of £10 million. That is a lot of money but a very modest sum compared with the £1.2 billion that gambling costs the Exchequer every year.

Before establishing such centres we need some demand analysis and, as none was readily available, I conducted my own. One of the most interesting results is that, unlike with other addictions such as alcohol and drugs, 60% of the public do not know where to get help if a loved one, employee or friend develops a gambling habit. Even health professionals struggle to know where to refer a problem gambler.

With a network of gambling clinics in the UK, there would be national signposts and support in the most distressed areas where help could readily be found. The cost of establishing the centres should be met by the gambling industry itself, with the centres run independently by the NHS. That is a further reason for the Government to review the voluntary gambling levy, currently producing about £10 million or £12 million. Raise it to 1% and we would have £130 million or £140 million. With those funds, we could not only get those clinics up and running around the country—they could be based on the west London model, which has been so successful—but conduct better research, educate young people on the dangers of gambling, provide more support for affected families and train more doctors and nurses.

The Gambling Act 2005 has, as one of its three objectives,

“protecting children and other vulnerable persons from being harmed … by gambling”.

But we are failing to do that—dramatically. Of the 430,000 problem gamblers in this country, nearly 10% are young people aged between 11 and 15. Just 8,000 of those 430,000 are in treatment. This equates to just 2% of all gambling addicts in the country, compared with up to 20% of those addicted to alcohol or drugs.

If the Government are to take up the challenge, establish the centres and reduce hospitalisation as a result, they must do so with more energy than they have shown over the implementation of the FOBT decision. We know that these are incredibly dangerous products. More than half of FOBT users are either addicted or in danger of becoming addicted to gambling. I am working with 17 families in which a child has committed suicide. They started their gambling life on FOBTs.

This is the beginning of a constructive plan to reduce hospitalisation of gambling addicts, reduce the cost of gambling to the Exchequer and begin to stop the gambling epidemic that threatens our country. To make it a success, the Government have to act more decisively, pay less attention to the gambling lobby than they have on FOBTs and put the people, particularly the young people, of Britain first.