The phenomenal rise of the UK gambling industry owes much to reforms, introduced by Tony Blair, that flipped the state’s attitude to sports betting and casino gaming on its head.
At the turn of the century, the government recognised that betting and gaming, in particular online, could not be prohibited and ought, instead, to be properly regulated.
But the 2005 Gambling Act went much further than that, in line with New Labour’s light-touch approach to business.
The new regulatory landscape meant that gambling could be aggressively advertised, rather than simply tolerated. Britain’s bookmakers and online casinos were now to be celebrated as the vanguard of a truly world-leading industry, creating jobs and paying taxes.
This step-change was accompanied by two other pivotal factors: the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, an innovation that would put a 24-hour casino in every pocket, and wall-to-wall television coverage of sport. Football fans soon got used to Ray Winstone’s disembodied head floating across the screen at half-time of televised matches, urging prospective customers of Bet365 to “Bet now!”.
Ladbrokes’ adverts cast punters as swaggering chancers, reminiscent of the opening credits introducing the characters of a Guy Ritchie film. Meanwhile, technological innovation spawned new subcultures, from the online poker boom to in-play betting and betting exchanges.
The atmosphere of supposedly harmless fun, even glamour, was infectious.
When I began reporting on the gambling sector almost eight years ago, I had few preconceptions about this seemingly ubiquitous industry. It was brash, yes, but was it really so different from other pastimes?
It soon became clear that vast swathes of Britain’s gambling industry were anything but benign.
In February 2016, Paddy Power was found by the industry regulator, the Gambling Commission, to have encouraged a problem gambler to keep betting until he lost five jobs, his home and contact with his children.
There were so-called VIP schemes that showered those who lost the most money with rewards – tickets to football matches, free food and drink, bonus offers – to encourage them to keep ploughing in their pay packets, or even their redundancy cheques.
Some plunged their families into financial ruin, while other victims stole millions of pounds to feed a high-roller lifestyle that enriched only their bookie. One large operator took 83% of its deposits from such “VIPs”, even though they made up just 2% of its customer base.
There were email marketing campaigns that offered “free” spins and bonuses to recovering addicts, even as countless stories emerged of family finances being ruined while casino companies looked the other way.
On the high street, bookmakers “clustered” as many fixed-odds betting terminals in one place as possible, typically in lower-income areas.
In one 10-month period in 2016-17, on more than 233,000 occasions punters lost £1,000 in a single session playing these digital roulette machines. Seven people lost more than £10,000 in a day.
Such figures are shocking in the abstract but each number represented a life changed, or at worst, lost.
A particularly pernicious feature of gambling addiction is that it often remains a secret until it is too late. Unlike drug or alcohol abuse, which is often physically evident, a gambler can silently ruin their family’s finances in an evening, while their unwitting partner sits next to them on the sofa.
Hidden tragedies began to emerge in ever greater numbers. One such case was the death of Jack Ritchie, who took his own life at 24, lost to an addiction that began with lunch-break trips to the bookies with his schoolmates.
Through their Gambling with Lives group, Jack’s parents, and others who have endured the same loss, channelled their pain into a powerful force for change.
Another case was that of Bylent “Bill” Troshupa. His estranged wife, Julie Martin, told how he set himself on fire in front of their teenage son after a mental breakdown that intensified as his gambling escalated.
And this week, an inquest into the death of Luke Ashton, who was targeted with free bets during Covid-19 lockdowns, will look at the role the gambling operator Flutter played.
Despite these extreme cases, the gambling industry and its lobbyists have long argued that overall “problem gambling” rates are low. This assertion relies on statistics that are either cherrypicked or misrepresented.
The recent NHS Health Survey found that 0.4% of the public in England are “problem gamblers”. The survey does not count homeless people, individuals in social care or prison, or students, all disproportionately likely to be high-risk gamblers. It also relies heavily on telephone interviews, which tend to skew towards lower numbers.
One 2020 survey by YouGov pitched the problem gambling rate much higher, at 2.7% of adults, or 1.4 million people.
Whatever the truth of that much-disputed number, it is not that helpful when assessing how dangerous certain gambling products actually are.
Take mountain climbing: rates of death and injury in the general population are very low, chiefly because very few people climb mountains. Among mountain climbers, however, casualty rates are rather higher.
Something similar is true for online casino games, which have grown faster than any other gambling segment, with annual revenues of nearly £4bn, nearly double that of sports betting.
The 2018 NHS Health Survey, the last to measure addictiveness according to product types, found that 8.5% of online casino players were problem gamblers, while almost 14% were at moderate risk. That is nearly a quarter of customers of the industry’s most lucrative product.
What is more, for every “problem gambler”, six other people are affected, according to some estimates. On that basis, even a conservative analysis indicates that millions of people are being harmed for the sake of industry profits.
Yet whenever campaigners, politicians or the media raise these concerns, they meet the same slur: “Prohibitionist!”
The term has been repeatedly deployed by the head of the Betting & Gaming Council (BGC) lobby group, the former Labour MP Michael Dugher. It has also been wheeled out by Tom Watson, the former deputy Labour leader, who styled himself as the scourge of the gambling industry while an MP, before going on to work for Paddy Power.
Measures put forward in the government’s recent white paper on gambling reform are likely to affect only a small proportion of gamblers.
If there is a powerful, secretive lobby working to affect the government’s plans, it is not the “prohibitionists” leading it.
Big gambling operators and the BGC have lavished hundreds of thousands of pounds of hospitality on MPs, some of whom have rehearsed industry talking points in parliament. Pro-industry MPs such as Philip Davies and Laurence Robertson have earned tens of thousands of pounds from second jobs, with companies including the Ladbrokes owner Entain and the BGC.
The Tory MP Scott Benton had the whip suspended after an investigation by the Times filmed him apparently offering to lobby for the sector.
If political support was not enough, gambling can rely on its lucrative alliance with the UK’s most popular sport. The English Football League only recently agreed to end a partnership under which clubs took a cut of fans’ betting losses. Earlier this month, it signed a five-year extension to its partnership with SkyBet.
Premier League clubs have agreed to give up gambling sponsors on shirts from 2026 but will keep pitch-side displays, the most visible form of gambling advertising in the game. Football has gambling’s back.
With much of the political and sporting establishment sympathetic to the gambling industry, it is no surprise to find that the government’s white paper envisages tweaks, rather than wholesale reform.
It includes some laudable efforts to make gambling safer, from tougher affordability checks to limits on online casino stakes. Yet advertising remains virtually untouched. Vague undertakings to improve the targeting of online and social media adverts offer scant meaningful change. Casino companies can continue to market their wares over the UK’s car radios during the school run, or during the trailers of PG-rated films.
Industry revenues, the government estimates, could fall by as little as 3% as a result of the reforms.
There is ample opportunity to make up the shortfall elsewhere. The gambling industry is making huge inroads into the new and lucrative US market, as well as turning its sights on developing economies in Africa, where rates of poverty are high and regulation is threadbare or nonexistent.
The onward march of technology offers untold new revenue streams, whether from the increasing convergence of gambling and video gaming – through features such as “loot boxes” – or emerging frontiers, such as betting in the metaverse.
The Blairite vision of Britain’s money-spinning gambling industry has been realised in lurid Technicolor and it looks likely not only to endure, but to flourish anew.
The house, of course, always wins.
• To order a copy of Jackpot by Rob Davies (Guardian Faber, £14.99) for £8.79, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• 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 befrienders.org.
