INSIGHT - PERCEPTION & PUBLIC IMAGE


Matt Zarb-Cousin, Spokesperson, Clean Up Gambling


Matt Zarb-Cousin is spokesperson for Clean Up Gambling a not-for-profit campaign. He also spearheaded the campaign which lobbied successfully for a reduction in the maximum stake on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals from £100 to £2 a spin.


Matt, why do you think that gambling gets such bad press, especially now?


A lot of these issues can be traced back to 2007 and 2014 when the 2005 gambling act had come into force but it took another seven years before online gambling was regulated . . . In that time a lot of operators were offshore and they weren’t regulated and they could access the British market and a lot of the companies’ cultures that developed out of that.


I feel like that by 2014 the Gambling Commission was almost trying to retrofit regulation into cultures that have kind of gone off on something of a tangent.


What has manifested is you have a situation where - depending on which estimates you are looking at - between 60 per cent to 84 per cent profits are coming from the five per cent of the customers who are considered problem or at risk gamblers.


So, operators themselves are commercially constrained by how much they can do individually to reduce gambling related harm and repair their image. It has to come from regulation, it has to come from the government understanding the industry dynamics of the market and levelling the playing field. In terms of why the industry’s


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image has become more negative, the media has amplified a lot of the worst cases. It's reflected broadly in how companies are tending to operate a lot of the time and obviously there’s more and more people who are harmed as the years go on and eventually everyone will know someone who’s been harmed or lost more than they can afford or been impacted in some way.


I think it's not just people's perceptions but people's realities — and obviously you can’t spin people’s lived experiences. Tey’ve lived it directly or indirectly and that's going to influence their perception too.


Is there anything the industry can do to improve its image?


I think that it is doing everything it can probably within the existing kind of commercial constraints it operates under. I’m realistic about it... I think it needs to come from regulation, it can’t come from an operator... I think operators engaging with


regulators constructively is really positive though.


What about industry led campaigns such as the Bet Regret campaign? Do you think the industry is genuinely trying to do a better job at preventing gambling related harm?


Te Bet Regret campaigns are aimed at people who are not addicted but who are considered to be the most likely to be at risk category and the issue with that is that it is very difficult to run effective behaviour change campaigns through advertising.


No one chooses to get addicted. It might have some impact but in terms of public health interventions it has limited efficacy.


One of the things we're doing now well is we’re trying to amplify the fact that there is practical support available for people who are already addicted. Obviously, it would be great to prevent that from happening in the first place but that’s got to come from regulation.


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