Young People: Gambling Harm

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Foster for bringing this subject before us. It is a difficult one. We all know why it is a difficult one. If you are taking money out of somebody’s pocket for gambling, it is not there for other subjects. It can become an addiction and destroy their life. If we forget that, we forget why we are concerned about it. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, made the secondary but very important point that sport is threatened and potentially destroyed by gambling. The whole essence of sport is threatened. The World Cup could have been made an irrelevance by a betting conspiracy. All that excitement, all that adrenaline, all that bringing together, all that positiveness could have been ruined by one betting scandal. Cricket came close at one point.

Racing is the most experienced bit of this. I live in the village of Lambourn. The amount of energy that goes into stopping illegal interference through gambling in racing is massive and has gone on for a long time. I know people who have been involved in this, hopefully all coming out on the right side of the law, but accusations have gone to the police. It can pervert things. What are we doing to stop betting behaviour becoming endemic and uncontrolled in the young? That is the question we are asking ourselves here. We had only one voice saying that this is not a problem, but the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is used to being by herself.

What are we doing to get in? There is PSHE and GambleAware. Do we do enough in other bits? I have often guarded against this when it comes to education, but are we teaching people that at the roulette table, it is not that you will win big once in a while? The odds that you will win are always pretty bad on every single turn. Gambling is there because somebody expects to make money from you and normally does—that is why they are still there.

This is something that I do not think we get across enough. There is a difference between playing cards for a few pennies but then suddenly realising, “Oh, I’m going to lose if I play against somebody else”, and going to one of these big, organised sites that are always at your pocket, always telling you that you might win big when we know that, the vast majority of times, you will not. That is why they are doing it. They are saying to you, “Yes, here’s a gamble that gives you a small buzz”, but it will take your money off you consistently. Kevin Keegan’s father may have won big to give him football boots. If he had not bet on the horses regularly, he might have got him new ones earlier.

We have to make sure that we get information about the damage into the young and their parents. There are age barriers over these new formats that people do not understand. Are we making sure that people understand the inherent dangers? My noble friend and I have often talked about loot boxes. I have met distinguished games designers who think they destroy the essence of many of the challenging and more complicated games out there, ones with some intellectual content: “Spend some money and you might get the thing you need to carry on with your activity—but you probably won’t, so you’d better buy a few more”. Then you have lots of wasted product, but the essence is there. What are the Government doing to inform those involved, those who are at risk and those who influence them that this activity will take money off you and give it to somebody else? No matter what the buzz is, that is the answer. Unless we get that established, we will miss the essence of it because that is what it is about. That is why it happens.