‘I lost £1m in a month’: Inside Britain’s gambling epidemic

Clare Donegan, who runs EmpowerHer. a free counselling service for Irish and Northern Irish women affected by gambling, echoes the point.  “A lot of the time it’s women in care-giving roles. It’s the mother or the person looking after someone with a disability.” 

If they have one thing in common it is a desire for escape. “Escape gambling is much more of a women’s thing. Women tend not to be looking at the papers, studying the form, the riders, the breeders and so on. They tend to head towards the fixed-odds type games, the ones they don’t have to think about. Women seem to want the instant gratification. The numbness.”

Gambling has long been a hidden problem yet, on a positive note, women are increasingly willing to come forward. Henrietta Bowden-Jones is the NHS England’s national clinical advisor on Gambling Harms. When she opened her first clinic in 2008, all of the attendees were male, despite attempts to reach women – including offers of free childcare. “At that time, societal stigma around being a problematic gambler were entrenched into an industry narrative that enhanced the individual’s failings for not being able to stop.” Women were often ashamed, fearful of partners, and worried that their children would be taken away. 

She is encouraged that women are more willing to come forward and optimistic that treatments can help. “Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and indeed pharmacotherapy work for both men and women,” she says. “We know that the current treatment delivered for free in the NHS across the whole country does work.”   

However, she has also noticed that the women who are accessing services are getting younger. “We used to see a lot of older women, bereaved wives who turned to gambling out of loneliness and despair or to make money… Mothers of sick children too, I have met many.” 

In the internet era, however, female gamblers are becoming more like male gamblers – which, in a sense, is hardly surprising since they are both being pushed towards the same sorts of products. The National Clinic data from 2020-2022 shows female gamblers primarily gambled online (80 per cent), followed by bookmakers (11 per cent), and the remaining 9 per cent either gambled primarily using scratchcards or attended casinos. The most popular method by far was slot games (67 per cent), which the majority played online. “Recently the age has lowered for women as the gender gap closes and women also start earlier and develop faster compulsions as severe as the men’s due the speed of play on the online gambling world.”

There is some optimism among reformists. Duncan Smith sees the 2023 white paper as an “excellent step in the right direction”. He believes stake limits, affordability checks, an ombudsman, and a statutory levy on the industry will help. He would also like to see far greater restrictions on advertising. “No one wants to see it, it leads directly to harm, children are being targeted, enough is enough and it needs to be stopped.”

Government reforms keeping industry alive

Still, there are many who feel that the proposed reforms do not go far enough and fear that the new Labour government will – like the last Labour government – see gambling as a useful source of tax. “It’s a shuffling of the deck chairs rather than something that’s going to have a real material difference,” says Gaskell. He sees the two stated aims, of promoting the industry, and protecting public health, fundamentally incompatible.  

“We’ve also got this model of co-regulation with the industry or self-regulation. The industry is seen as good-faith actors trying to reduce harm. They’re asked to come up with ways to regulate themselves. It’s extraordinary we have given that power to the industry.” 

Meanwhile, Cassidy argues that the likely effect of the reforms tabled will be to prolong the life of the industry and increase the volume of harm it causes. “How do you compensate a family for the loss of a son? Those things are not on the same continuum. If you are trying to prevent harm, you need to prevent that harm occurring in the first place.” 

Another question that we might like to consider is: to what extent are we OK with companies training machines to profile us, groom us, and manipulate us to do things that in our rational moments, we would never agree to do? Every gambling addict I speak to talks of having their brain “rewired”. But it’s also a mechanism that many of us will recognise, when we refresh our social media feeds, or reach for ultra-processed foods, say. 

“The most awful thing about it is that the person that you were is no longer,” says Chrissy. “Everything about you is completely decimated. You’re left with an empty shell. That’s what I feel happened to me. I was groomed. I was victimised.” She has since been diagnosed with PTSD and thinks she is probably now on the ADHD spectrum. “If you’ve spoken to some of the medical professionals they will talk about this mental debilitation.”

At 66, she is doing much better now and is determined not to be quiet about it anymore. 

“It’s abhorrent to me now. I can’t listen to Classic FM anymore because of the adverts. People have died. People do die. It’s got to stop.”