‘Bookies must use profits to treat addicts’

GAMBLING operators should be forced to pay 1 per cent of their profits to help tackle addiction to betting, a new campaign group has demanded.

Bereaved parents whose children were driven to suicide by despair over gambling debts have called for the Government to introduce the levy to fund better treatment for addicts and support for families.

The group, Gambling With Lives, said addicts were up to three times more likely to attempt suicide than those fighting other addictions, and needed vastly improved support. It has called for the 1 per cent levy, a maximum £2 stake for online casino and slot games, and for greater recognition of gambling as a public health issue.

Britain has an estimated 430,000 adult gambling addicts, with 1.57million more said to be ‘at risk’ of developing a real addiction, and experts have warned that a growing number of children are becoming hooked. Research last year by the Gambling Commission found 25,000 11- to 16-year- olds were ‘problem gamblers’, with another 36,000 deemed ‘at risk’.

Liz Ritchie, whose 24-year- old son Jack killed himself last year after he became hooked on online betting while still at secondary school, accused gambling operators of ‘grooming’ youngsters. She told the Mail: ‘He was great. But he was groomed by the gambling companies. These are ordinary children targeted by British companies.’

She and husband Charles have joined forces with other bereaved parents to form Gambling With Lives to lobby politicians for a change in the law.

They want the Government to introduce a statutory levy on operators of at least 1 per cent of gross profits to pay for research, education and treatment.

The industry overall made a profit of £13.8billion in the 2015/16 financial year, meaning under the levy it would have had to donate £138million.

But under a deal struck with the last Labour government when it deregulated gambling in 2007, operators are asked for only a 0.1 per cent voluntary contribution.

The charity Gamble Aware, which administers the donations and supports Britain’s only specialist clinic for problem gambling, said that in 2016 it received just £8million, which rose to £9million last year. A spokesman added: ‘We would like to see the introduction of a statutory levy, as there has been a consistent shortfall in funding.’

Conservative peer Lord Chadlington, who has campaigned for tougher controls for online gambling, said he would support the 1 per cent levy.

He added: ‘We are on the lip of a gambling epidemic, and the industry must step up and take some responsibility for this.

‘There should be a 1 per cent mandatory levy on all gambling profits which would generate over £130million a year. That’s how we will avert this imminent epidemic.’

‘We are on the lip of a gambling epidemic’

ON Pages 16-17 today, Dominic Lawson spells out the harrowing human cost of Tony Blair’s grotesque ambition to make Britain ‘a world leader in the field of online gambling’.

Many will find it impossible to read our columnist’s interviews with bereaved families of betting addicts without a stab of anger over the 2005 Gambling Act. This was the pernicious law that infected the high street with ‘crack cocaine’ fixed- odds betting terminals, while letting bookmakers advertise on TV – not just after the watershed but during live sporting events before 9pm.

For the betting industry, Mr Blair’s liberalisation has brought massive riches, with profits of £14billion in 2015-16.

For far too many of the Uk’s estimated 430,000 addicts, sucked in by sophisticated psychological techniques, it has yielded only debt, desolation and despair.

The Mail has no blanket objection to betting. Indeed, we recognise the odd flutter can give innocent pleasure.

But the relentless barrage of adverts for online betting aimed at the young – never more flagrantly than during the current World Cup – is simply wrong. Many of Mr Blair’s catastrophic mistakes, such as the Iraq War, can never be undone. His gambling free-for-all – destroyer of families and promising lives – can and must be reversed before more parents are condemned to grieve.