Does Wales have a gambling problem?
It’s been called a ‘gambling epidemic’ and when you look at the losses suffered in Wales over the last twelve months it’s easy to see why.
Around £500m was lost in bookmakers’ shops and on online accounts – double the amount taken from gamblers in 2001.
This amount breaks down to an incredible £169 per head in losses last year.
And the remarkable sum does not even include the amounts staked in bingo halls and the National Lottery.
Shadow Welsh Minister David Jones said the rise of online betting was making gambling a problem for Wales, with people able to “sit in the comfort of their own home with a cup of tea or a glass of wine and fritter their life’s savings away.”
Research from the Betting Research Unit at Nottingham Business School shows we are spending double the amount on betting compared to 2001, when tax on betting was abolished.
Leighton Vaughan Williams the Welsh professor who heads the unit, said: “If you add together gaming machines, betting on horses and football and politics, casinos and everything, then Wales will be looking at a £500m spend.
“That’s just the amount people are spending – the actual turnover will be a lot higher.”
The boom in betting was caused by two factors, he said – the introduction of the National Lottery, which made gambling seem less seedy, and the scrapping of betting tax in 2001.
Prof Williams, from Merthyr Tydfil, said: “You’ve got to remember if you just go back less than 20 years ago, betting shop windows were blacked out and you weren’t allowed to have carpets on the floors.
“There was a certain stigma about betting in general.
“But if you’re allowed to go into a shop and put a couple of pounds on a lottery ticket, it’s difficult to see why you should be stigmatized in betting shops.
In recent years the numbers of bookmakers shops has rocketed while online gambling has soared.
Figures from the Horse Race Betting Levy Board show £6.8m came from online betting UK-wide in 2006/07 – up by £1m in a year.
Clive Hawkswood, of the Remote Gambling Association, said: “Probably around a million people in the UK regularly gamble online. There’s a whole generation who won’t go to betting shops but will instead gamble online.”
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