'Changing gambling laws is the best bet for us all'

29 April 2023 , 18:20

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The long-awaited white paper on gambling reforms was unveiled by the Culture Secretary this week (Image: Getty Images)

In 1980 I got my first Saturday job in my uncle’s bookmaker’s shop. I took down telephone bets, marked up race cards, made the tea and emptied the overflowing ashtrays.

Then I started helping on the tills and got to know the eccentric regulars and the little old ladies with their 10p yankees and accumulators.

But I often saw my uncle having a quiet word with punters trying to place bigger bets than usual, or turning away customers who were clearly three sheets to the wind.

I loved the buzz of the bookies and felt the adrenaline rush when someone had a big win.

But 30 years later, I saw things rather differently, when I befriended a man in a psychiatric hospital who was being treated for gambling addiction.

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He was a university graduate with a successful career who’d got hooked on FOBTs – the gaming machines once dubbed “the crack cocaine” of the betting world. And his drug ended up robbing him of his job, his home and his family – before he tried to commit suicide three times.

This was just a few years after the Labour Government’s Gambling Act of 2005 liberalised the industry and turned it into a £14bn blockbuster.

But that legislation was never designed for the rise of touch-screen technology that effectively put an entire Las Vegas on every person’s phone.

And the digital bookies don’t care if a punter blows £120k in a single online spree. They’ll just stick a £400 bonus in his account to make sure he keeps on betting.

Britain’s gambling laws urgently need modernising, so I welcome the long-awaited white paper unveiled by the Culture Secretary this week.

It recommends limits on individual online bets, checks on punters whose losses suggest a problem, and a statutory levy for betting firms to fund addiction research and treatment.

This could cost the gaming industry around £1billion though, so I expect the lobbyists are already smooth talking MPs. And as it will also produce £2billion in tax for the Treasury, will the Tories really take the odds? They can’t afford not to.

My friend got to rebuild his life, but other people are not so lucky.

There are a third of a million problem gamblers in this country, and young men are particularly vulnerable.

And as they lose their jobs, homes and relationships, society as a whole loses out – to the tune of £1.2bn a year.

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But gambling addiction also results in one suicide every day. And those stakes are far too high.

Rachael Bletchly