Young People: Gambling Harm
Baroness Gerada Excerpts(5 days, 4 hours ago)
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Baroness Gerada (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for bringing this debate and for the unfailing, tireless work he does in this area. I declare my interest as medical director of the Primary Care Gambling Service, which treats patients experiencing gambling-related harms in services across England.
No matter how good my service is, when a young person walks through that door, we have already failed them. As noble Lords have heard, the numbers tell their own story: nearly half of 11 to 17 year-olds have gambled in the past year and 30% have spent their own money doing so, which is up from 27% last year. Most strikingly, the increase is being driven almost entirely by unregulated gambling, which has risen from 15% to 18% in just one year. Separately, the Gambling Commission finds that one in five 18 to 24 year-olds now gambles to relieve stress. These are not statistics about a handful of unlucky individuals. They describe a generation growing up in an environment designed to make gambling feel normal, safe and sociable—on their phones and in their feeds, increasingly disguised as a game and with no meaningful age gate.
That is why prevention cannot begin only once harm has appeared and cannot mean simply warning young people about risks. It must mean intervening upstream: in product design, in advertising and in the “free-to-play” and loot-box mechanics that train children in gambling behaviours before they have ever placed a bet with real money. It has to mean treating gambling harm, as the health Select Committee of this House argued and as the noble Lord, Lord Foster, said so eloquently, as a public health issue, not simply as a matter of consumer choice.
This brings me, briefly, to the statutory levy. We finally have a statutory levy replacing the old voluntary system. In principle, that is real progress. It has raised £120 million this year, roughly triple what voluntary donations ever achieved, and gives us a sustainable foundation for research, prevention and treatment. But while the levy gives us more money, it does not in itself give us a gambling prevention strategy.
GambleAware closed its doors at the end of March, after more than 20 years, warning that the transition risked fragmentation. That uncertainty has had consequences. Last year, citing a lack of sustainable funding, GamCare ended its young people’s provision, which had reached more than a quarter of a million children, young people and parents over the past five years. Coming as the new levy settlement leaves youth prevention work unfunded, it is exactly the kind of capacity we should be protecting, not losing. I raise this not to relitigate the levy but because prevention—school-based education, youth work, early intervention and public awareness campaigns around major sporting events, as we have just had with the World Cup—is precisely what suffers when funding is unstable or unco-ordinated. Prevention depends on continuity.
My central ask today is not about the levy. It is this: if we are serious about preventing gambling harm in young people, we need to close the gap between how we regulate gambling and how fast the products marketed at young people are evolving. Unregulated gambling products, influencer marketing and constant gambling content on social media are shaping attitudes long before young people are legally allowed to gamble. We need to keep asking, as this House has before, whether we are designing policy around what protects children or around what the industry finds tolerable.
Prevention is not measured by the number of people it treats; it is measured by the number of people who never need treatment in the first place. If we get prevention right, we will spare thousands of young people avoidable harm and spend far less on treatment in years to follow. That is the investment, and the responsibility, that I hope this Minister—who I am pleased is remaining—will keep firmly in view.
In-game Purchases: Protections for Children
Baroness Gerada Excerpts(6 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Twycross (Lab)
As the noble Earl will be aware, most schools—90% of secondary schools and 99.8% of primary schools—have a mobile phone policy limiting students’ use of mobile phones during school hours. We do not want to exclude children from services which are age appropriate. In relation to screen time, the Government are taking action, but it is important to recognise that screens are part of family life now. The question that parents are asking is not whether they should use them but how to use them well. The Government are going to issue their first guidance on screen use for under-fives in April. This will include tips on how it can be incorporated into activities such as talking, reading and playing safely.
Baroness Gerada (CB)
My Lords, I refer noble Lords to my declaration of interest: I run a service for those with gambling-related harms on the NHS. I wonder whether the Minister considers that any product where you can exchange money for a random reward could be classified as gambling, which loot boxes are. The Minister mentioned that the reason why loot boxes are not classified as gambling is that there is no exchange in real life of the monetary reward. That is currently very disputed. You can exchange, in the so-called grey market, the money that you gain. Loot boxes have all the features of gambling, and to call them gambling lite does not protect children and young people.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I have not referred to them as gambling lite. The law is clear that loot boxes are not currently legally considered gambling, for the reasons that the noble Baroness outlined. The grey market is not a legal market, and the Gambling Commission and the Advertising Standards Authority, where appropriate, take action on illegal gambling in whatever form it takes.