Researchers call for more limits on casino games and gambling ads in the UK
A panel of researchers made the call at a parliamentary Health and Social Care Committee meeting.
UK.- Researchers have told British MPs that more restrictions should be placed on land-based slots and gambling ads. At a meeting of the parliamentary Health and Social Care Committee, the researchers also made recommendations relating to the new British gambling levy.
The panel comprises Sam Chamberlain, professor of psychiatry at the University of Southampton; Heather Wardle, professor of gambling research and policy at the University of Glasgow, and Lucy Hubber, director of Public Health Nottingham. They said the government should make more restrictions and protection on land-based slots and other casino games a priority.
Wardle welcomed the new stake limits for online casino games and the introduction of financial vulnerability checks, but said that land-based slots machines should be subject to more limits. The 2023 Gambling White Paper focused on bringing online casino slots more in line with land-based machines but proposed allowing more of certain machines in land-based venues. Wardle also called for tougher rules for gambling advertising.
She said: “I think we need to have much more severe restrictions and greater protections at a population level, particularly for children and young people, but also for those who are harmed and to not normalise this behaviour.
“We think gambling is normalised because we see it so much in the advertising, but when you actually look at the data, only 16 per cent of the population have bet on sports in the past year. It is actually a minority behaviour, yet we feel it’s a majority behaviour.”
Chamberlain also supported stricter advertising regulations, as well as ensuring transparent administration of the new British gambling levy. He said safeguards should be in place to ensure “decisions aren’t influenced by people with vested interests.”
The levy, which enters force this month, aims to raise £100m a year for gambling research, education and treatment. It replaces the previous system of voluntary contributions from the gambling industry, which were administered by GambleAware. That system had led to claims that industry held influence over research into gambling.
Although funds from the new mandatory levy will be administered by the NHS, the researchers still had concerns about how it will be distributed. Chamberlain said research into gambling prevention, policy, education and treatment had been difficult under the previous system as many researchers had ethical concerns over the origins of the funding.
He said: “In parallel, there’s been a lack of funding from our trusted funding bodies. What you have is a dearth of good quality research, in my opinion, over the last decades, as many of the good researchers in the field of gambling would have not been prepared to take that money because of ethical and other concerns.
“In pragmatic terms, the industry has been giving cash to one massive charity that then has been handing out that money to various organisations.” He added that this did not mean that all of that work was invalid.
Wardle, who received funding from GambleAware in the past, said the chief executive of a funder once asked her to remove a key finding from a press release.
She said: “What I would say reflecting on those experiences is not necessarily on the way I actually did my research, it was how the research priorities and questions were determined in the first place and how they then reflected particular viewpoints, how the industry were consulted on what those questions might be and then it was about control of the messaging from the outputs, [and] the communication strategy around that.”
