Gambling and the Sovereign Individual

It’s time for the gambling industry to stop offloading responsibility

The urgent need to reform gambling laws is rising up the political agenda. In 2018 the House of Lords secured a select committee whose report Gambling Harm — Time for Action: The Social and Economic Impact of the Gambling Industry produced a series of recommendations. These became the cornerstone of the largest cross-party group in the Lords, Peers for Gambling Reform, with over 150 members. This undoubtedly helped persuade Whitehall and the current Government to launch their Gambling Review, which closed for submissions at the end of March this year.

With submissions now under review, it is vitally important campaigners don’t take their foot off the gas. One of the most important cultural achievements in this struggle has been the re-framing of the debate. Where only a few years ago reformers might have been written off as puritans depriving ordinary folk of their fun, the damage wrought by poorly regulated gambling has become all too noticeable and widespread for these dismissals to hold weight any longer.

Change is on the horizon. The question is what change will we get? The gambling industry has been quick to appear pro-active in dealing with the issue of problem gambling. Anyone with an interest in sport will have noticed the increase in the number of warnings attached to gambling advertisements. At the same time, the industry has been keen to hype up the threat of the unregulated black market. A problem that whilst deserving of serious attention should not detract from the more pervasive harm caused by regulated gambling.

Part of the issue with the industry’s approach is its heavy reliance on the Reno or so-called ‘responsible gambling model’ which attributes harm to individual choice and circumstance. To be critical of this model is not to imply that individuals don’t have agency, but to recognise that the rise of the internet has opened the door to more addictive forms of gambling which are available 24/7 in everyone’s home.

Dopamine feedback loops, common in social media applications, have been embedded into many online gambling platforms, which keep people gambling. In fact, like social media, these addictive neurological connections are designed not just to be addictive, but to condition the brain into addiction through dopamine release systems. When combined with pre-existing psychological conditions or poor mental health, this can produce a dangerous cocktail.

For the gambling industry to keep asserting the sovereignty of the individual hides this complexity. If the architecture of the game is inherently designed to be addictive, surely it is better to deal with the problem directly through prevention rather than the state picking up the bill resulting from addiction?

This is why the Lords Select Committee report proposed structural limits for online gambling products, capping stakes, and legislating to ensure equalisation of online speed of play with machines in betting shops. This is not a simple fix, but it does curb losses and provide additional space between games to help individuals break out of their addictive loops.

The problem for the gambling industry is that any reduction in gambling-related harms will hit their profits. According to the latest figures from NatCen 84% of Gross Gambling Revenue came from the 5% of highest losing customers. The industry has highlighted the tools they’ve introduced to curb excessive gambling, but all of the advertisements still place the individual at the centre — it is about what you can do to curb your gambling. What may appear as an appeal to genuine concern could in fact be a subtle reinforcement of the Reno Model, an offloading of responsibility for problem gambling away from the industry and onto the individual.

If we are going to reduce the levels of gambling-related harm, we have to confront the Reno Model which has been uncritically adopted across Whitehall and the Government. We have to face the fact that it is in the gambling industry’s interest to fan the flames of addiction. The individual remains sovereign, but equally sovereign is the gambling industry, and it is time they stop denying their own agency in encouraging problem gambling.