Just minutes after Kay Wadsworth got a call to say that her daughter Kimberly had died after a struggle with gambling addiction, a roulette advert blared on her television.
“I could have got that TV and thrown it off my balcony, I was so angry about it,” she recalls.
Kimberly was 32 when she took her own life in 2018. Kay says that in the years leading up to that point, her daughter had been bombarded with adverts and marketing that normalised and encouraged her addiction to gambling.
Kay, 68, had hoped that a long-awaited white paper on gambling published on Thursday would bring in sweeping restrictions on the industry’s techniques for luring in and keeping vulnerable customers such as Kimberly. But she is bitterly disappointed.
There are no immediate plans to curb traditional advertising and many other areas of proposed regulation will only be consulted on. There is concern among MPs that putting so much out to consultation at a time of legislative backlog is likely to result in little change.
“It’s not anywhere near enough,” Kay says. “It needs to be done now, with proper legislation put in place. Not just consulting on it.”
She believes that instead of slogans such as “Take time to think” appearing after clips promoting gambling, such adverts should be banned altogether, “because it’s killed my daughter, and it’s killed [others] over a long period of time”.
Kimberly had worked in marketing and her mother remembers her as “full of life and very, very funny”. She had started out going to casinos in Leeds where she lived, but by the time she ended her life she was hooked on online blackjack and other games.
“She permanently had her phone by the side of her,” Kay says. “If I walked into her bedroom, that was the first thing that went under her pillow. She was doing it through the night and she’d have very little sleep.”
Kimberly’s addiction escalated after her father died suddenly in 2015 and her mental health plummeted. As her gambling became more frequent, her mother says she was put on to a VIP scheme by one company that saw her showered with offers and free bets online to lure her in further.
“They would say: ‘Oh, you haven’t gambled for a couple of days. Is it because of money? Well, we’ll just stick another £50 in your bank account, or another £100’ – and that encouraged her to just keep going.”
It had been hoped that the white paper might take immediate action on controversial VIP schemes, which often target customers losing the largest sums of money. But instead these will only be “monitored”, while bonus offers such as free bets are yet another issue under consultation.
Affordability checks are also being consulted on, but it is likely that even the stricter versions of these would not have identified Kimberly’s problem.
While she spent thousands of pounds on gambling, her mother says she did not have big debts. She used up money from her share of the sale of her parents’ house and was often spending within her means, albeit while making catastrophic losses that left her in despair.
Kay wants to see the banks keeping an eye on high losses. “If they saw money going out extremely quickly, perhaps they could get someone to phone them or email them or just to give them a gentle nudge.”
She is a member of Gambling With Lives, a charity representing grieving families whose relatives have ended their lives after struggling with gambling addiction. They want gambling disorder to be seen as a public health emergency.
As Kimberly’s addiction deepened, Kay says it became harder to recognise her daughter and booked for her to see a clinical hypnotherapist. “She became very, very aggressive at the later stage before she died. I used to call her my Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde.”
Two weeks before she died, Kimberly had gone to Portugal to spend the week with her mother. “We had a lovely, lovely holiday,” Kay recalls. “I felt I’d got my Kimberly back. Two weeks later, the day that she was supposed to see this clinical hypnotherapist in Leeds, was the day that she died. And I don’t think she could cope with the shame of it all and the stigma.”
She believes that Thursday’s white paper will not result in fast enough change to prevent more deaths such as Kimberly’s.
“There will be more people dying. The legislation needs to be really tough and [MPs need to] stop the delaying tactics. Too many people have died and it doesn’t go far enough.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
