Lottery loophole lets 16-year-olds bet £350 a week
A LooPhoLe in the law is allowing children as young as 16 to spend up to £350 a week gambling on national Lottery games.
Campaigners and MPs fear it could lead to a gambling epidemic in future generations, with the latest figures revealing that 16 and 17-year- olds spent £47million on national Lottery games in 2017-2018.
The normal minimum age for gambling is 18, but the loophole gives Camelot, which runs the lottery, exclusive access to a teenage market. Children can enter the lottery and buy scratchcards – and also play 45 instant-win games, one of which offers a top prize of £500,000.
The games are under the names of traditional family favourites such as Monopoly, Scrabble and Cluedo, with wins of up to £300,000. The company also introduced a Love Island-themed scratchcard.
Tory MP Richard holden, who is campaigning to end the loophole, described it as ‘highly disturbing’ and ‘ridiculous’.
The MP for north West Durham told the Daily Mail: ‘The idea that the lottery is getting £50 million a year from 16 and 17-year- olds – the majority of which is coming from instant- win games – is highly disturbing.
‘It is the only place where 16 and 17-year- olds can play cash prize instant-win games. It’s really odd that there’s this loophole that the national Lottery has to allow online instant-win gambling of up to £350 a week for children. The age needs to be raised to 18. It’s meant to be a lottery – it’s not meant to be kids with scratchcards or playing online on their phones.’
Labour MP Carolyn harris, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on gambling-related harm, told The Sunday Times: ‘The lottery is clearly competing with mainstream gambling companies, but they have the advantage of being able to target children.’
The group has written to Culture Secretary oliver Dowden to call for the minimum age to play the lottery to be raised to 18 ‘as a matter of urgency’.
Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for england, told The Sunday Times: ‘It’s surprising, given the large, worrying and well-established numbers of children who problem gamble, that any gaming platform should have a lower age limit than any other.’
Matt Zarb-Cousin, director of Clean up Gambling said: ‘The younger you are, the more likely you are to get addicted.
‘All online gambling should have a minimum age of 18.’
Camelot said: ‘We agree with the Government that it is appropriate to review this – but ultimately it is a matter for the Government, and if it chooses to raise the age to 18, we will support that.’
‘A matter of urgency’
THAT spectral sound you can hear is the ghost of Margaret Thatcher saying ‘I told you so’. This image came to me when reading the Sunday Times’s revelation of how a ‘loophole’ had allowed children of 16 and 17 to gamble up to £350 a week in pursuit of National Lottery jackpots on their laptops or smartphones.
The state-licensed lottery monopolist Camelot offers more than 40 ‘instant-win’ online games, promising ‘lots of fun, loads of prizes’ in what the paper described as ‘a parade of bright colours, flashing lights and photos of glamorous 20-somethings celebrating their wins’.
Other gambling firms are banned from pursuing the under-18s, but Camelot takes about £50 million a year from 16 and 17year-olds, two-thirds of this from ‘instantwin’ online games and scratchcards.
This is not the wholesome and straightforward once-a-week competition that the National Lottery presented itself as when launched by the then prime minister, John Major, in 1994. Although Major’s predecessor was known to have the profoundest reservations about his signing of the Maastricht Treaty which inaugurated the common European passport, her opposition to the creation of a national lottery was less remarked upon.
Malign
But Major’s chancellor, Norman Lamont, told me that when, as a minister in her last administration, he had tried to persuade Thatcher to licence a national lottery, she had thundered at him: ‘So long as I am Prime Minister, there will be no state encouragement of gambling!’
And in his recently published memoir, Nicholas Coleridge, the former UK boss of the Condé Nast magazine empire, recalled the ex-PM Thatcher telling him how she had upbraided a woman she saw buying a lottery ticket: ‘I approached her at once, and urged her not to waste her precious coin. I said “Don’t waste it, dear, you should invest that pound instead”.’
Then, wagging her finger at Coleridge and his companion, she went on: ‘I hope neither of you will ever contemplate buying a lottery ticket. It’s not a game, it’s a racket!’
It was an almost unbearable irony that the movie The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep and whose portrayal of Thatcher in the advanced stages of dementia so upset her family, was financed with £1 million from the National Lottery ‘good causes’ fund (to which is directed a quarter of the Lottery’s income from punters).
Margaret Thatcher had been brought up a Methodist, a church with a particular horror of gambling — though it was the Labour Party with which Methodism had been most associated.
The former Labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley was alluding to this when, in 2005, he lambasted the Gambling Act of the Blair government, which legalised TV advertising of betting and also the iniquitous fixed odds betting terminals on every high street in the land, on which people could bet up to £100 every 20 seconds.
When Hattersley denounced his party’s decision to turbo-charge the promotion of gambling as ‘shameful, because it betrays what were the best instincts of the Labour Party and exposes thousands of people to exploitation and the misery of debt’, he was accused of ‘gross disloyalty’.
But if anything, he had underestimated the malign consequences, not least for young people, as well as what Margaret Thatcher would have thought of as the ‘feckless poor’.
According to the industry’s own regulator, the Gambling Commission, around half a million children — no fewer than one in six of those aged between 11 and 15 — now gamble. Its 2018 survey showed that one in eight students admitted they had skipped lectures in order to pursue their habit, and that the number of 16year-olds hooked on gambling had risen by a third in just three years. There are now around half a million people in the UK defined as having ‘a serious gambling problem’, a figure which would have been unimaginable a generation ago.
While the National Lottery is by no means the most addictive form of gambling, I gained a minuscule insight into its ability to delude its participants on the one occasion on which I bought tickets.
It was the week of its first super-rollover (or whatever they call it) when the prize on offer had reached something like £20 million. In the days between buying the ticket and the declaration of the winner, I became bizarrely certain that I would be that winner, and formed increasingly detailed plans about how I would spend the money.
I’m embarrassed to say that I felt a slight sense that it was ‘wrong’ when I turned out not to be the jackpot winner after all. When I came to my senses, I understood just how potent this delusion is for so many people.
It helps explains why Camelot is hugely profitable, enabling it to pay out an anticipated £5 million to its very successful long-time boss Diane Thompson, after she had left the company (her reward as part of a ‘long-term incentive plan’).
Destroys
In total, Camelot’s directors have taken more than £40 million in pay and benefits since the operator’s latest licence began in 2009. The company’s slogan ‘It could be you’, should be amended to ‘It will be us’, when applied to its own executives.
Of course, the success it has had in attracting 16 and 17-year-olds to take up the habit boosts the profits which justify those salaries and bonuses.
I appreciate the argument that gambling is, for the most part, conducted by adults who should be free to spend their money how they wish, however stupidly.
But the inexorable rise in children becoming addicted to a pursuit which destroys families and is associated with an increasing number of suicides by young men is undoubtedly linked to the National Lottery’s gargantuan presence — and its development of ‘instant games’, whether in the form of scratchcards or online.
Camelot: leave the kids out of it.