Gambling Advertising Everywhere, Says Former Addict Who Lost £1m and Calls for Government Crackdown

In 2012, Hussain Vorajee sat beside the hospital bed of his disabled daughter at Bristol Children's Hospital, where she was spending the first year of her life undergoing repeated operations. He was placing bets. He had been gambling for a decade by then, and before the next ten years were out he would lose more than £1m. Getting from his home in Gloucester to Bristol was itself an achievement: more than once he had gambled away the money he needed for the journey.

Hussain, now 49, says gambling was the first thing he did each morning. He did it at work, at red traffic lights and, once, during a gamblers anonymous meeting. "My mind was gone," he says. He tried to end his life. He has not gambled for six years, but he says the industry has done nothing to help; it has instead kept him surrounded by temptation. Gloucester has 24 betting shops. Billboards promote the races at nearby Cheltenham Festival. A barrage of adverts greets him at every Manchester United match he attends as a devoted fan. "Every corner I turn, I feel that I'm very close to my next bet," he says.

His path into addiction tracks a change in the industry. In 2001, the year he married his first wife, gambling machines arrived in British bookmakers, offering largely unregulated games of pure chance rather than bets on real-world events. Within a year he had spent £200,000 in a single Ladbrokes shop. He calls the machines "the crack cocaine of gambling". Later came online betting, which he describes as a casino in his pocket. One evening he deposited £10,000 into an account while his wife cooked poppadoms; by the time dinner was ready it was gone.

The damage was wide. He had been a successful businessman in property and mobile phone sales, which he says was booming between 1999 and 2013. Instead his properties and cars were repossessed, he lost his job and he went bankrupt. He says the addiction cost him two marriages and his relationship with his eldest son.

Hussain wants the government to crack down on advertising so fewer young people follow him. A study of 3,000 people by the charity GambleAware found 62% say gambling advertising is "everywhere", and 31% recall seeing their first gambling advert before the age of 17. Current industry advertising spend is not public; Regulus Partners estimated it at £1.5bn in 2017. Research from the University of Bristol found Premier League fans were exposed to nearly 30,000 gambling messages on TV, radio and social media over the season's opening weekend last August, with adverts viewed 24 million times on social media. Industry revenue reached £15.1bn in the year to March 2023, against £8.3bn in 2009.

Whether advertising causes addiction is contested. A 2020 House of Lords committee found a correlation with problem gambling but no evidence of a causal link. A 2023 Gambling Commission survey of 10,000 adults found 2.5% were problem gamblers, though how common addiction is remains disputed. Respublica estimated in 2018 that almost a quarter of online gambling profits came from problem gamblers and a third more from people at risk. The National Centre for Social Research found in 2022 that the top 10% of gamblers generated 79% of revenue, while stressing that far from all of them would be expected to experience harm.

The Betting and Gaming Council says the industry must follow strict guidelines and safer gambling messaging, has voluntarily banned ads within five minutes of pre-watershed live sport, and commits 20% of TV, radio and digital advertising to safer gambling. A spokesman says 22.5 million people in Britain bet each month, the overwhelming majority safely, and warns that countries with advertising bans see a much larger black market. Italy banned almost all gambling advertising in 2019, including sports sponsorship, influencers and targeted ads. Ipsos found Britain has fewer restrictions than Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. In February, Stake gave up its licence during a Gambling Commission investigation into a video on X featuring a porn star and displaying its logo.

Hussain says change must be "massive", warning of more suicides otherwise. A 2023 YouGov survey for GambleAware found 44% of people struggling with problem gambling were at high risk of suicidal ideation, though the Gambling Commission's chief executive, Andrew Rhodes, said that year there were no robust figures on severe harms such as gambling-related suicide. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport says it will monitor advertising closely and plans a statutory levy on gambling profits to raise £100m for research, prevention and treatment, replacing voluntary contributions that averaged about £42m over the past four years.