The supposed costs of gambling

OHID, the agency formerly known as Public Health England, last week released a series of reports about gambling which replace a similar set released by PHE in 2021. They now reckon that gambling costs the country between £1 billion and £1.8 billion a year. However, this is not a net cost and most of it is neither a financial cost nor an external cost.

I've took a look at the figures on my Substack.

 

As the crusade against gambling gathers pace in the UK it is becoming clear that there are two tactics being used to make it ‘the new tobacco’.

The first is to treat it as a ‘public health’ issue. ‘Public health’ activists/academics are always keen to find (a) new dragons to slay and (b) fresh pots of grant money. Once gambling is seen as a public health issue, the door is open to the kind of regulation that smokers, drinkers and, increasingly, eaters have been treated to over the years.

Unfortunately, ‘public health’ academics know even less about gambling than they do about the other issues upon which they pontificate. The articles they have started writing for medical journals in recent years spout the usual empty rhetoric about the ‘whole systems approach’ and dust down policies from tobacco control that don’t make any sense in the context of gambling. You can’t really put a sin tax on gambling, for instance, because people chose their own stakes and you certainly can’t put gambling in plain packaging, although that hasn’t stopped ‘public health’ chancers from suggesting it.

The second tactic is to pathologise and demonise gambling in general, rather than focus on problem gambling. This allows the ‘public health’ lobby to settle into the comfort of the ‘no safe level’ rhetoric it uses with tobacco and alcohol while justifying policies based on the ludicrous whole population approach. Rather than treating pathological gambling as a psychological disorder that affects a small number of people, gambling per se is to be treated as unhealthy.

Public Health England was all set to drive forward with this strategy. An early draft of a PHE press release in 2021 said:

‘Health leaders from organisations such as X and X are joining PHE in calling for a public health approach to gambling focusing on prevention, early intervention and treatment. This approach is similar to how we tackle tobacco consumption or unhealthy food consumption, and would require cross-government support’.

PHE was closed down for being incompetent shortly afterwards, but before it imploded it put on a series of reports on gambling, and its successor, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), has now produced some updates of them.

 

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