Gambling harm is a growing public health issue in England. One in 9 people are directly or indirectly harmed by gambling and between 117 and 496 gambling-related suicides happen every year. Evidence shows a clear, dose-response relationship between exposure to gambling advertising and gambling behaviour: the more people see or hear gambling marketing, the more likely they are to gamble, and the greater the risk of harm.
The Local Health and Global Profits (LHGP) research consortium has responded to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's consultation on banning unlicensed gambling sponsorship. The consultation proposes to ban physical gambling sponsorship and advertising (e.g. stadium branding, shirt sponsorship, venue naming) by unlicensed operators, across all sectors.
A welcome step that could go further
LHGP welcomes the proposed ban as a necessary step but argues it needs to go further to meaningfully reduce gambling-related harm. The response draws on the "balloon effect", which is well documented across health-harming industries, whereby companies redirect marketing spend into less regulated channels when one route is restricted. On current proposals, the wider gambling industry can simply shift resources into licensed sponsorship, and into online and digital advertising, neither of which are covered by the ban.
LHGP's response therefore recommends that the ban be extended to:
- Both licensed and unlicensed operators. A reduction in gambling-related harm will only be achieved through a reduction in the total volume of advertising exposure, not a reshuffling of where that exposure comes from.
- Online and digital platforms, not just physical sponsorship assets. Digitalisation has transformed gambling marketing, allowing companies to use data-driven targeting, algorithms and "nudge" tactics that are barely touched by current policy and that give operators disproportionate power to drive habitual gambling.
Marketing is pervasive, targeted and highly profitable
The gambling industry spends £1.5 billion a year on advertising, reflecting just how effective marketing is at both retaining and recruiting gamblers. Almost a third of current gamblers report that marketing has directly prompted their spending.
This marketing does not fall evenly across the population. Young men, the demographic most likely to exhibit problem gambling behaviour, are reached over twice as often by gambling adverts as women. Seven in ten young people have seen or heard gambling promotion through some form of media, and adult gaming centres are disproportionately concentrated in the country's most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
Timelines must be protected from industry interference
LHGP supports setting a fixed start date for the ban, implemented ahead of the 2027/28 football season. During the opening weekend of the English Premier League alone, over 27,000 gambling messages were identified, with more than 5,000 in a single match. This equates to around a third of the live broadcast containing at least one gambling advert.
Dr Nason Maani, Deputy Director of LHGP, says, “The gambling industry, like other health-harming industries before it, has a well-documented history of using delay and lobbying tactics to weaken or block regulation that threatens its commercial interests. Government must ensure the timeline for introducing this ban is not diluted or delayed by industry pressure.”
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