Senior NHS clinicians demand addiction levy for the gambling industry

Senior NHS clinicians who treat gambling addictions have called on the industry to face a new multi-million-pound statutory levy to fund the prevention and treatment of gambling-related harm.

The calls are led by Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones, director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic, and Dr Matt Gaskell, clinical lead for the NHS Northern Gambling Service. They would like to see a new independent health board created to tackle gambling addiction.

This new board would oversee the spending of levy funds, which could reach tens of millions of pounds a year. They have also said it should be led by the Department of Health, not the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

There are also calls that the government should set a clear target for reducing gambling-related harm, cutting it by half in five years.

In a paper for the Social Market Foundation (SMF) think tank, Bowden-Jones and Gaskell said that the current voluntary arrangements for support for addiction services are failing terribly.

The paper states: “The current voluntary system has no integration of NHS services, no consistency in funding decisions, no independent evaluation of long-term impact or regulation via the Care Quality Commission, no coordinated oversight from research councils over research into harm, and serious questions have been asked about the independence of this voluntary system from the influence of the gambling industry.”

At the moment, gambling companies make voluntary donations to the charity GambleAware, to fund a range of treatments for those suffering from gambling addiction. This deal provides up to £100m over four years.

This deal, however, will come to an end on 1 April, as the NHS announced it would sever financial ties with the charity due to patients and clinicians expressing concerns as to where the money came from.

With the long-awaited government white paper on gambling reforms expected in May, senior fellow at the SMF Dr James Noyes said that the government should use this opportunity to put the prevention and treatment of gambling harm under the control of the Department of Health and Social Care, and paid for by a proper statutory framework.

Noyes said: “In 2020, a House of Lords select committee report stated that it is ‘beyond belief’ that DCMS has steadfastly refused to introduce a statutory levy on the gambling industry. Yet two years on, we have still not seen any progress.”

Noyes added: “This is despite the fact that dozens of leading clinicians, academics and parliamentarians have called for an end to the current voluntary arrangement between DCMS, GambleAware and the gambling industry.”

The paper has put a projected timeline for how this levy would work. It says that there should be a calculation done to assess which parts of the industry contribute more harm than others, which would take place in 2023 so that in 2024 a ‘smart’ levy can be introduced.