Gambling: Regulatory Reform

Cameron Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Cameron Thomas (Tewkesbury) (LD)]

In the absence of my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon), I thank you, Sir Desmond. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard) for securing this important debate.

As a teenaged boy, every morning on my way to school I would stop off at the home of my friend M and we would walk the last few hundred metres to school together. We shared a number of classes, and every lunch time we would abscond back to his house to play video games. As we became adults, we enjoyed betting on weekend football accumulators as we watched the live scores come in, at the small cost of a few pounds.

As I came to spend fewer weekends with our friendship group, and gradually lost interest in betting, M continued to bet more consistently and with ever greater stakes. The rise in online gambling firms was followed by increasingly invasive advertising campaigns, not only on the shirts of the footballers he watched or on the hoardings of premier league football stadiums, but increasingly in his social media feeds. Everywhere M looked, there was a betting company chipping away at his judgment, enticing him to put money down.

Adverts showed groups of young men cheering at TV screens in packed bars. They did not show dark bedrooms dimly illuminated by computer monitors or mobile phones. They did not show vulnerable young men in despair, having lost a pay packet on the first weekend of the month. M was well into his 20s by the time he realised he was a problem gambler. By the time he had reached his 30s, family members were protecting his wages from his addiction. By the time he was 40, he had twice lost deposits he had been saving to buy a home.

There is a sensible and nuanced course of action to be charted here. People such as my friend M need action, but establishments such as Cheltenham Racecourse in my constituency of Tewkesbury must not be conflated with online betting companies. Cheltenham Racecourse’s 250,000 annual visitors generate £274 million for the Gloucestershire economy, but the Jockey Club, which operates the racecourse in my Tewkesbury constituency, generates a tiny fraction of the huge profits enjoyed by large online gambling companies.

Taxation that fails to discriminate between such vastly different operations risks undermining the viability of horseracing, one of Britain’s oldest and most recognisable national sports, which contributes more than £3 billion annually to the British economy. I welcome the Government’s implementation of a Liberal Democrat policy in its increase to the remote gaming duty, though that money should be ringfenced to treat victims of gambling-related harms.

The most crucial action that must be taken, however, as my hon. Friend the Member for Witney said, is to restrict betting advertisement, particularly of the type that bombards sports viewers and seeks to blur the lines between sports and betting. Effective affordability checks could better protect those vulnerable to gambling addiction. I also note the speech by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), who said that a betting ombudsman is long overdue.

The Government should tackle gambling harms, but they must distinguish between those operations that prey on the vulnerable—at all hours, across all platforms—and those that genuinely contribute to our culture and economy.