Industry challenges the evidence behind the Lords’ call for a gambling ad ban

Public health campaigners have long wanted bookmakers treated like tobacco companies. On 17 September, a follow-up report from the House of Lords Liaison Committee urged the government to ban gambling advertising “as soon as practicable”.

It also told ministers to abandon their aim of growing the licensed industry and to return to the pre-2005 doctrine that gambling should be tolerated but not promoted. The committee argues that there is “no evidence for the safety of gambling advertising”.

The industry sees it differently. Grainne Hurst, chief executive of the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC), calls it “a deeply misguided report which risks weakening, rather than strengthening, consumer protection”.

Start with the numbers. The report’s first factual claim is that between 1 million and 1.5 million adults in Great Britain gamble in a way that may be called problem gambling. That estimate comes from the Gambling Commission’s Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB), which puts 2.4% of adults at a score of eight or more on the Problem Gambling Severity Index. The report itself acknowledges that the NHS Health Survey for England, which found a rate of 0.7% in 2024, implies about 350,000.

A disputed measure of harm

Speaking to iGB, Dan Waugh, a partner at consultancy firm Regulus Partners, notes that the GSGB produces higher rates than every other official source going back almost two decades, including three NHS surveys and the commission’s own telephone survey.

His explanation is topic salience: the tendency of people with an interest in a survey’s subject to be more likely to take part in it. Because the GSGB presents itself as a gambling survey, he argues, “it over-recruits gamblers and more engaged gamblers”.

A response rate of 18%-19%, short of the survey’s 22% target, makes matters worse, according to Waugh. He says Heather Wardle, an academic, warned the commission in 2023 that topic salience bias was the likely cause of over-reporting, advice that emerged only through a freedom of information request.

Experts versus experts

The commission stands by the survey, which it says was “designed by experts, reviewed by experts and approved by experts”, and argues that respondents are more honest when no interviewer is present.

The report cites Patrick Sturgis of the London School of Economics as endorsing the method, yet his own review for the commission in 2024 advised caution about a risk of overstatement. The committee sets out the dispute, then suggests that it is the older surveys, including those behind its own 2020 report, that “may indeed have been underestimated”.

Waugh’s verdict is that the report “notes that concerns have been raised about the GSGB – but then largely proceeds on the basis that the GSGB is accurate”.

Too soon to judge?

Timing is another point of contention. The committee concludes that voluntary measures “have not gone far enough”. Yet the most significant of them – the Premier League’s removal of gambling sponsors from the front of shirts – began only in August.

The committee took oral evidence on 17 June, before a single shirt had changed, and still declared itself “not confident” in the ban. It leans on an academic estimate that the ban will cut visible gambling marketing by only around 9%. Waugh, who also gave oral evidence to the committee, told it: “I think 9% is still a meaningful reduction.” The report records his response in a single paragraph.

The committee cites Manchester United’s reported training kit deal with Betway as evidence that sponsorship is shifting rather than disappearing. It takes a similar approach elsewhere, recommending that a wagering cap introduced in January, and opt-in rules for direct marketing that have yet to be evaluated, be replaced with outright bans.

The sharpest disagreement concerns the black market. The industry’s central objection to an advertising ban is that it would leave the field open to illegal operators. The committee rejects this as “insufficiently evidenced”.

Hurst puts it differently: “Most concerning is the report’s willingness to dismiss the rapidly growing threat from the criminal gambling market simply because it does not fit its conclusions.”

The committee’s main counter-evidence, relayed by the UKRI Gambling Harms Research UK Evidence Centre, is a study by Philip Newall, Allegra Whybrow and Jamie Torrance. Interviews with “representatives of state monopoly operators across European jurisdictions”, the report says, “consistently suggested that advertising restrictions did not lead to consumer migration towards illegal operators”.

The monopoly view

The study was not designed to answer that question. Its authors interviewed 11 people in safer gambling roles at ten state-owned operators in 2024; seven were based in Europe. Its subject was safer gambling practice, not illegal markets. And in a monopoly market, the only alternative to the state brand is an illegal one. Europe’s club of online monopolies is shrinking.

Finland shows why. Veikkaus, the state operator, has argued since 2022 that its own monopoly should end. The Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority has estimated that around half of Finnish online gambling money is spent outside the monopoly.

“A lot of gaming is outside the official channels,” Olli Sarekoski, Veikkaus’s chief executive, told Lottery Daily last month. “What is the point of the monopoly if this is the case?”

He added: “It’s easier to create very tight regulations, but it’s very demanding to keep the channeling rate up.”

Finland opens its online market to licensed competitors next July. Veikkaus’ argument concerns market structure rather than advertising as such, but it contrasts with the picture drawn from the monopoly interviews.

The black market question

The industry’s own figures are also disputed. The BGC’s projection that unlicensed operators will spend £845m on British advertising this year comes from research it commissioned from WARC, and the Gambling Commission says its own data show no sustained growth in illegal-market engagement.

But critics point to how the report handles evidence. It calls the government’s demand for causal proof of harm a “fundamental misunderstanding” of social science, asserting that it does “not doubt” that licensed operators produce most advertising volume, while conceding a few paragraphs earlier that it received no clear evidence either way.

It also gives prominence to Newall’s description of displacement as “a misleading industry talking point” and repeats modelling, cited by the Coalition to End Gambling Ads, which claims a 10% fall in gambling spending would add £1.25 billion to the economy and 22,000 jobs.

Waugh is clear, saying: “The overall impression is that the Lords committee decided at the outset what they wanted their inquiry to find and that any impediments to this – such as issues of data reliability or the threat of increased criminality – were arguments to be overcome rather than genuine issues to be understood and addressed.”

A question of enforcement

The report, he says, expresses an aspiration regarding enforcement action to suppress the black market “without taking the time to appreciate just how difficult this is in practice”.

Hurst points to Italy, which banned almost all gambling advertising years ago yet still has a substantial illegal market, and to the Netherlands, where she says the regulator has warned against a total ban while reporting that only around half of gambling spending goes to licensed operators.

The committee has a partial answer on Italy: much of the surviving advertising there came from licensed firms using “alibi” brands as a loophole rather than displacement. Hurst’s broader warning is that a blanket ban “would remove a key competitive advantage of being licensed and regulated”.

A brief inquiry

The committee, chaired by Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede and joined by four members of the original 2020 inquiry, held a single evidence session and invited written evidence from what it calls a “small, balanced, selection” of parties.

Members’ declared interests cut both ways. Lord Smith of Hindhead chairs the Association of Conservative Clubs, whose clubs host gaming machines and bingo. Lord Foster of Bath, acting chair of the former committee, declared that his reform work is supported by a consultancy paid for by Derek Webb, who also funds the Campaign for Fairer Gambling and the Coalition to End Gambling Ads.

The coalition’s director, Will Prochaska, was a leading witness; he and Lord Foster both sit on the board of the charity Action on Gambling. Asked how the committee weighed the shirt ban, the monopoly evidence and the GSGB debate, a Lords spokesperson said “a wide range of arguments” had been reflected in the report, and pointed to the relevant paragraphs.

The government has two months to respond.