Lords Push for Full UK Gambling Advertising Ban

The House of Lords Liaison Committee wants gambling advertising banned outright across the UK. Its call lands days after the Local Health and Global Profits research consortium asked for the same thing.

Lord Foster of Bath chairs Peers for Gambling Reform, and he led the committee's push. Take advertising back to where it sat before 2005, the Lords say. Back then the rule was simple enough: gambling should be tolerated, not stimulated. Only bingo, football pools, the National Lottery and social lotteries got airtime on TV and radio. Britain, the committee argues, is now an outlier. The Netherlands has edged toward a blanket ban. Australia caps gambling adverts at three an hour.

Lord Foster didn't dress it up. As many as 1.5 million people in Britain struggle with problem gambling, he said, and the fallout hits them, their families, their communities. Ban most gambling advertising and you get less gambling, which means less problem gambling and less harm. The sector would shrink rather than grow, he added, and millions of people would be better off for it. Strip it back and the committee is asking for key terms of the 2005 Act to be reversed.

On the black market, the Lords were blunt. Yes, more must be done about unregulated gambling. But they don't buy the idea that cracking down on licensed operators pushes punters to illegal ones. Worries about the illegal market can't block action on the clear harms coming out of the licensed sector, the committee said. That puts them directly against the industry's oldest argument, the one the Betting and Gaming Council has put at the centre of its comms for years, through the three-year review of the Gambling Act and last year's tax fights.

The BGC restated that position this week. CEO Grainne Hurst claimed around £8m will be staked with illegal operators during the 250th anniversary of the St Leger at Doncaster Racecourse. Millions will go to illegal operators across the meeting, she said, businesses that contribute nothing to racing, pay no UK tax and offer none of the protections found in the regulated market. That £8m figure is carrying a lot of weight. It will get tested if DCMS moves.

Politics around all this is messy. Talk of a Machine Gaming Duty rise hangs over Chancellor John Healey's Autumn Budget. Remote Gaming Duty has already gone from 21% to 40%. General Betting Duty is due to climb from 15% to 25%. Margins are squeezed, so marketing spend is down. A full ad ban takes another bite, and it would flatten whatever visibility gap still separates licensed operators from unlicensed ones, at a moment when black market bookmakers are plastered across social media.

So far DCMS has shown little hunger for curbing legal operators' advertising. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is a known critic of the sector, its high-street presence in particular. Baroness Twycross, the former Gambling Minister, is quoted in the Lords report saying the government will act in the public interest on gambling harm and work with the regulated sector to make it as safe as it can be. The public would probably like less advertising, she noted, then added: I am not sure that is really my role as a Minister to do just what the public thinks. Vicky Foxcroft has since taken her job as DCMS Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State. Burnham appointed her, so expect a similar scepticism.

Gambling is only part of the DCMS brief. Sport, digital media and online markets all sit there too, and every one of them would feel a ban. The EFL has partnered Sky Bet for years. Countless Championship clubs lean on betting deals, and losing them would hurt football, the lower leagues most of all. Rugby league, snooker, darts and boxing would take the same hit. Lord Foster's answer is Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research estimates: cut consumer gambling spend by 10% and you add £1.25bn in gross value added, plus 22,000 jobs.

This is the latest in a long line of attempts to curb or kill off gambling's UK presence. Licensed operators won't thank anyone for it. For affiliates the read is simple: a ban shrinks the pool of licensed brands bidding for traffic, and the black market pays no commission. The recommendations now sit with DCMS. Foxcroft decides what happens next.