Gambling Harm (Social and Economic Impact of the Gambling Industry Committee Report)

Lord Layard Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, I had the honour of being a member of this committee. It was beautifully chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Grade, and had a brilliant secretary. It is an outstanding report.

I will talk about the problem of addiction. As we know, there are many forms of addiction—tobacco, alcohol, drugs and gambling—which are all very serious. Gambling is as serious as the others. The numbers addicted to gambling are, in fact, very similar to the numbers addicted to drugs and alcohol. Each affects roughly 1% of the population, yet we treat these addictions completely differently. It is quite extraordinary when you look at it.

On tobacco, for example, we ban all advertising and the NHS spends billions on treating the consequences of tobacco consumption. On drugs, we ban their consumption totally. On drug and alcohol dependence, we spend more than £1 billion each on treating those who suffer from them. What about gambling? Regulation is pretty minimal, as the noble Lord, Lord Grade, pointed out, and we provide almost no treatment to the victims. This all has to change.

I will focus on just two issues: the regulation of gambling advertising and marketing, and the treatment services for those addicted to gambling. Until the 2005 Act, most advertising of gambling was banned. Quite simply, that is the position that we need to re-establish. Nearly half of all children aged 11 to 16 report that they see gambling advertisements at least once a week. No wonder the rate of problem gambling is higher in that age group than in any other. Is this not an incredible fact about our society? It is illegal to gamble under 16, yet people aged 11 to 16 have the highest rate of addiction. That is also, of course, extremely serious for their future. As a committee, we met many gambling addicts, who almost invariably said that they had got hooked before the age of 18. At least a third of all gamblers say that it was advertising that brought them in and there is other good evidence that advertising directly causes more people to gamble.

Surely we should be banning the advertising of gambling, and with it the sponsorship of sports by the gambling industry, which is another form of advertising. The only exceptions could be horseracing and other similar sports, which children do not watch. The ban should also cover all forms of direct online marketing.

This is not a draconian approach, compared with what is done with other forms of addictive behaviour and substances. In fact, the YouGov poll says that two-thirds of the British population want gambling advertising banned. So why can we not have that? It simply means going back to where we were before 2005.

Since 2005, of course, a massively profitable industry has developed, with a yield of £14 billion in 2019. But 60% of those profits come from 5% of gamblers—the 5% who are either addicts or at risk. We have to protect people from getting hooked, and that means protecting them from advertising.

Then, when people are hooked, we must provide help. As the chairman said, roughly one gambler a day dies through suicide. This is a major public health problem. Yet of all addicts, only 2% to 3% get any form of treatment. This compares with 30% of those with drug and alcohol problems. There are good treatments for gambling disorders and the NHS should be providing them. As we know, 15 clinics have been promised, which should open as soon as possible, but rapidly after that we need there to be a comparable number.

There is a good model of how to organise all this in the NHS’s so-called Improving Access to Psychological Therapies—IAPT—programme for depression and anxiety disorders. In remarkable contrast to the speed of the Government’s gambling proposals, this set up nearly 100 services within its first three years. How can we tolerate just 15 clinics being proposed over an unspecified period? It is not good enough.

This problem must not get muddled up with the levy issue, because it is a duty of the NHS to treat health problems, and we know there is going to be a problem over the levy—its method of disbursement, and so on. The Government should be mandating the NHS in its annual mandate to rapidly expand the number of clinics for gambling disorder.

We know that this is not a marginal problem. The noble Lord, Lord Grade, referred to 340,000 addicts, including 55,000 aged under 16, but, of course, in addition to those numbers, their families and colleagues are affected, the community is affected and crime increases. It is estimated that altogether some 2 million people in our community are affected by this problem. The main point I am trying to make is: let us think about gambling addiction as a problem as serious as tobacco, drugs and alcohol.

I believe that we have a Minister who understands the issues and I really hope that his department can produce a White Paper which matches the scale of the problem.