Politics Home | Policy positions don’t get any easier for government than banning gambling ads

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Gambling harms millions of Britons a year. An estimated 1.4 million people experience problem gambling, including tens of thousands of children, with multiples more harmed indirectly. Families are ruined, debt is accrued, crimes are committed, high streets are ravaged, and lives are taken.

Why would society want something so destructive to be promoted? These facts alone should be enough for a government to end gambling advertising, but we know that economic growth is a defining mission and must be considered.

Fortunately, action on gambling ads is a kind of holy grail for policymakers. Sir Iain Duncan Smith recently said: “It is a rare thing for a policy that will protect people from harm to also help deliver economic growth, cost the government nothing, and have popular public support. Gambling reform is one such policy.”

Numerous studies have shown that if we reduce gambling at the population level we would boost the economy. According to Sheffield University this year, a 10 per cent reduction in gambling spend would lead to a £1.25bn uplift and more than 22,000 new jobs. Imagine what could be achieved if we cut it in half.

The researchers emphasise that these figures are likely an underestimate of the true economic benefit as they don’t account for the massive secondary gains from a healthier workforce, such as reduced sickness and increased productivity. Neither do they allow for the reduction in the multi-billion-pound cost to society of the damage gambling causes.

Evidence in this area is growing all the time. Latest Department of Culture Media and Sport statistics on the Gross Value Add (GVA) of their sectors show that gambling is by far the lowest contributor. What’s more its GVA has fallen by as much as 40 per cent since 2019 despite gambling revenues growing.

What lies behind this apparent paradox is unclear, but it might be to do with the gambling sector’s move away from labour-intensive forms of gambling (high street bookmakers/land-based casinos) towards data-driven online slots, based overseas in low tax jurisdictions.

That won’t stop the sector crying foul against a ban on gambling ads with siren calls about the need to protect jobs at bookmakers, and sport’s dependence on gambling revenues. But land-based bookmakers were sustainable before ubiquitous gambling advertising was permitted, and sport’s dependence on gambling revenues has been described as “illusory” by the former CEO of the FA and Chairman of Tranmere Rovers, Mark Pallios. You only need to look at how Formula 1 thrived after its cars stopped looking like cigarette packets to get an appropriate parallel.

So what of the sector’s final challenge – the “black market bogeyman”? The argument goes that if we ban gambling advertising then illegal casinos will simply swoop in and take over the market. If this sounds familiar it’s because a similar argument has been deployed by big tobacco for years, but policy makers have become so accustomed to their misinformation that it bounces off.

The unlicensed market for gambling is more complicated, and the sector’s claims are worthy of investigation before being dismissed. The best estimates of the size of the unlicensed sector are that it represents less than 10 per cent of the online gambling market in Great Britain excluding the lottery, and approximately 4 per cent of the total gambling market. Not insubstantial, but not significant enough to dictate policy.

Go a little deeper and the scaremongering becomes more apparent. It turns out that over half the people who use illegal gambling websites are doing so because they’ve excluded themselves from legal sites. In other words, they’ve become addicted to gambling using licensed operators’ products, have tried to stop by self-excluding online, and have then relapsed by being lured back in by unlicensed casinos that don’t abide by the rules.

In this way a liberal licensed market for gambling eventually leads to growth of the illegal market. This is a situation that is currently playing out in America, where states are being lobbied to liberalise gambling as a way to combat illegal gambling, only to end up with an out-of-control licensed sector alongside an out-of-control and growing illegal sector.

The only sensible response is to stop stimulating the market for gambling – full stop. Banning gambling advertising across the board would make it much harder for both illegal and legal sites to advertise, and it would stop normalising gambling, which undoubtedly has been a disaster for Britain. Polling for the Coalition to End Gambling Ads (CEGA) by More in Common shows support across the political spectrum.

The cherry on top of this opportunity for government is that it already has the power to ban gambling ads included in the 2005 Gambling Act. The Labour government that passed that legislation thought they might need a policy handbrake in case their newly liberalised gambling sector got out of control. It’s time for the current Labour government to use it.