Tired charade of ‘safer gambling week’ shows need for action

‘Safer Gambling Week’ is emblematic of all that is wrong with the gambling industry in the UK. This week is less about safety and more about big gambling pretending it has a heart. It doesn’t. Safer gambling week is simply a play lifted directly from the tobacco industry. For years, big tobacco pretended its product wasn’t addictive. It claimed that cigarettes were a harmless pleasure, and that smoking was a personal choice that didn’t affect other people. Today we know different.

Big tobacco manipulated its products to be addictive – smoking is harmful to a person’s health and second-hand smoke also causes cancer. All of this was known to the industry, yet industry executives charmed the government to stop change and protect their profits. The raw truth is that gambling, like smoking, kills. In the UK, one person takes their own life because of gambling every single day. Gambling is a public health issue, and the government needs to act now.

More than 1.5 million people in the UK are addicted to gambling. 24-hour internet gambling means the gambling industry is free to manipulate vulnerable people out of cash 24/7. Since the introduction of the Gambling Act in 2005, big gambling has been free to target the public through widespread advertising, with little or no limitation. This has been compounded with the rise of VIP schemes and loyalty programmes, allowing addicts to be directly targeted.

Gambling lobbyists target sport in the same way big tobacco did. Last year, a documentary estimated that a person watching a Premier League football match could see a gambling logo onscreen over 700 times. Sport and gambling are now so interlinked that a gambling company was recently fined for having its logo emblazoned on a football team’s kids colouring competition. This toxic culture needs to change, for the sake of the next generation.

The government has promised changed but despite many promises, big gambling has not been regulated. If gamblers are to be kept safe, the government needs to do for gambling what it did for tobacco. Advertising needs to be cut and the gambling industry needs to be placed under a levy that is sufficient to properly meet the public health crisis it has inspired. The industry must be properly regulated as well, to ensure that it is not free to target the vulnerable.

This issue needs urgent government action but to date, the government has failed to act. There’s a real risk that the Government will also ignore the issue and simply allow big gambling to continue to cause harm to people across the UK. The reality is gambling is not safe. Safer gambling week is designed to blame the addict for the harms they face. The gambling industry would have us believe that the gamblers don’t act in a safe and responsible way, so their suffering is on them.

The reality is that big gambling has spent 20 years making their product more addictive, easier to play, and available 24 hours whilst ignoring pleas from suffering individuals. It has long past time that gambling was treated in the same way as tobacco. Only the government can bring in reform. It’s time for Ministers to ask whether they will continue to listen to heartless big gambling, or pay heed to the people suffering in many ways because of its actions?