Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what estimate she has made of the cost to the UK economy of problem gambling.

Measuring the cost of problem gambling is a complicated task. The study by The Institute of Public Policy Research “Cards on the Table”, published in December 2016, estimated that the cost to the Government associated with problem gamblers ranged between £260m and £1.16bn. This reflects an estimate of the costs of public services for those individuals, but it does not capture the wider impact of problem gambling and gambling-related harm to the UK economy. The report can be found here: https://about.gambleaware.org/media/1367/cards-on-the-table_dec16.pdf

GambleAware is commissioning research to improve understanding of gambling-related harm which should lead to a set of metrics which we can use to measure the impact of gambling-related harm on a wider scale. We continue to take problem gambling and gambling-related harm seriously and welcome developments to better understand this issue.