A cross-party group of peers has called for almost all gambling advertising in the UK to be banned, provoking an angry response from the lobby representing bookmakers and casinos.
The House of Lords liaison committee said the government had been “too passive” as gambling advertising spread across television, digital platforms and social media. Its 173-page report concluded that a tobacco-style advertising ban, with exceptions for the lottery and racecourses, would be the “most effective” way to reduce gambling-related harm.
British bookmakers, casinos and slot machine venues took £12.6bn from customers in Great Britain last year. Up to 1.4 million people have a gambling problem, according to official estimates. Behind those figures lie ruined finances, broken relationships and deaths by suicide. What appears on company accounts as revenue represents money lost by millions of people.
The gambling industry sells the possibility of sudden escape from the pressures of everyday life. For workers facing stagnant wages, rising rents and permanent insecurity, the promise of transforming a small stake into financial freedom has an obvious appeal. Gambling capital takes that hope, packages it and sells it back to the working class at a profit.
Advertising is essential to this process. The industry spent an estimated £2bn promoting gambling in 2024, saturating sport, social media and other forms of entertainment with betting brands. It isn’t simply informing people that gambling exists. It is manufacturing demand, presenting repeated losses as entertainment and the exceptional win as something always within reach.
The committee acknowledged that an advertising ban would probably cause the gambling sector to shrink. It nevertheless found that this could produce a longer-term economic benefit, as money that would otherwise be lost through gambling was spent elsewhere.
This cuts through the usual claim that every profitable industry automatically benefits society. Gambling doesn’t create the £12.6bn it collects from customers. It transfers money from them to gambling capital, after deducting winnings and operating costs. A smaller gambling industry would mean less profit for its owners, but it wouldn’t mean that the money had vanished from the economy. Much of it would instead remain available for food, housing, clothing, leisure and other goods and services.
The Betting & Gaming Council responded by describing the proposed ban as “deeply misguided”. It claimed that restricting advertising by licensed operators would strengthen the illicit gambling market, which would continue to target customers without following the rules imposed on legal businesses.
Grainne Hurst, the BGC’s chief executive, said: “A blanket advertising ban would remove a key competitive advantage of being licensed and regulated while doing nothing to stop illegal operators targeting British consumers.”
The phrase “competitive advantage” is revealing. The BGC treats the ability to promote gambling throughout public life as a commercial reward owed to licensed capital. Harmful advertising becomes a privilege the state must preserve so that one group of gambling businesses can compete against another.
The BGC estimates that half of all money spent advertising gambling now comes from a rapidly growing illicit market. Even if its estimate is accepted, the existence of illegal operators doesn’t erase the harm caused by legal ones. It merely means that the legal industry is invoking a more openly predatory section of the same market to defend its own access to customers.
Lord Foster, one of the report’s authors, accepted that the illicit market was a “legitimate concern” and pointed to regulatory efforts against rogue websites. But he added: “That should not deflect us from the need to address the harm that is being created by the legal market.”
The present advertising regime is the product of a political decision. Tony Blair’s Labour government liberalised gambling advertising through the Gambling Act 2005. Before the act, television advertising was largely restricted to bingo, football pools and lotteries, including the National Lottery.
Blair’s government presented liberalisation as modernisation. Gambling was to be regulated, legitimised and encouraged to grow as a leisure industry capable of creating jobs and contributing to the economy. This was New Labour’s wider political programme in miniature: remove barriers to capitalist expansion, invite private capital into more areas of social life and then rely on limited regulation to contain the resulting damage.
Once gambling had been established as a major source of profit, its promotion expanded rapidly. Advertising spending eventually reached billions of pounds a year, while betting companies became embedded in sport and digital culture. The state created the conditions for the industry’s growth and is now being urged to manage consequences that were entirely predictable.
Andy Burnham has taken a more critical position than Blair. As mayor of Greater Manchester, he backed giving councils greater powers to prevent new betting shops and “slot farms” opening on high streets. He also said he wanted to “relegate gambling sponsorship of sport to the history books”.
But the dispute isn’t simply between politicians with different personal attitudes. It reflects a contradiction within the capitalist state. Governments want the investment, employment and tax revenue associated with profitable industries, while also having to contain enough of the social damage they cause to preserve political stability. Regulation usually begins only after capital has been allowed to establish itself, accumulate profits and build a powerful lobbying apparatus.
The BGC points to voluntary restrictions introduced by its members, including the “whistle to whistle” agreement not to show gambling adverts during televised sporting fixtures. Such voluntary measures allow the industry to present itself as responsible while retaining influence over how far restrictions go. Capital is permitted to police itself, and its own need for profit sets the boundaries of acceptable reform.
The argument over gambling advertising therefore isn’t a neutral disagreement about public policy. On one side are millions of people exposed to an industry whose income ultimately depends on their losses. On the other is an organised section of capital defending a market worth billions of pounds.
The fury of the gambling lobby makes sense once the issue is viewed in class terms. Advertising brings customers into the market, customers bring losses and those losses become corporate revenue. What the industry calls legitimate competition is its organised struggle to preserve that flow of money.
