Gambling exploits the weakest

When will Britain admit it has a chronic gambling problem that needs urgent treatment?

It was reported that some big names in the gaming industry are using their gambling websites to lure children through games based on their favourite cartoon or storybook characters.

This is despite the fact that, as reported by the Gambling Commission, almost half a million children under 16 are betting every week.

Wicked and cynical exploitation by the gaming industry? Sure, but that’s not the half of it.

This month the government is expected to publish a delayed report on whether to curb fixedodds betting terminals and slash their maximum stake from £100 to £2.

The report has been delayed because the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which wants to impose such restrictions, is opposed by the Treasury.

About £1.8 billion is wagered on these terminals every year, contributing more than £400 million to the exchequer. The Treasury fears that cutting the stake would be ‘‘financially crippling’’. It is not concerned in the slightest about the people and families who are being crippled by these addictive gambling machines.

Yet the damage being done by FOBTs, which allow gamblers to lose up to £100 every 20 seconds, is immense and growing. The amount people are losing on them has increased by 73 per cent since 2009, from £ 1 billion to almost £1.8 billion.

Yet the number of machines has risen over the same period by 9 per cent.

Statistics published in May revealed that players on these terminals lost at least £1000 on 233,071 occasions.

The Gambling Commission has also found evidence of an increase in addiction among those using them. In addition to being highly addictive, FOBTs are linked to family breakdown, debt and money laundering.

Jason Frost, who was president of Bacta, the arcade gaming industry association, has said they are ‘‘a hardcore form of gambling’’ which ‘‘foster a culture of violence and aggression’’.

Although pernicious, they are part of a much broader and troubling issue. The Gambling Commission estimates that some two million people in the UK are either problem gamblers or at risk of addiction, with the number of over-16 problem gamblers having grown by a third in three years.

The Gambling Act 2005, which came into force in 2007, opened the door to TV advertising for sports betting, online casinos and poker as well as the scourge of FOBTs.

Nothing revealed so graphically, during the Blair/ Brown administrations, the collapse of Labour’s historic mission to improve society by protecting the vulnerable, incentivising socially responsible behaviour and diminishing the capacity for harm.

In taking off the brakes on gambling, Labour unforgivably betrayed its core constituency, the people to whom it constantly pays such pious lip service: the poor.

Now there is evidence that the gaming industry is going even further to lure the poorest and most vulnerable to yield to its cruel illusions of easy money. With online gambling ads becoming more expensive, the industry is reportedly making increasing use of third-party companies to harvest people’s data.

If society is understood to entail a measure of responsibility for each other rather than a collection of atomised individuals all doing their own thing, the misconceived deregulation of gambling needs to be dialled right back.

The Times, LONDON