BETTER CHANGE
When I grow up, I want to work in gambling!
Better Change’s engagement director, Rob Mabbett, wonders how many of us planned to work in gambling, and how many of us… just got lucky!
orking in gambling was certainly not one of my aspirations when I was at school nor was it in my early career, yet here we are, and I am sure the same can be said for the majority of those who fi nd themselves in our industry. I found my way into the gambling industry in 2012 because I enjoyed gambling, I had a retail background and to be honest I was more enthusiastic about the prices of racehorses than I was about the prices of milk and bread so that was it and I haven’t looked back since. Granted this is a slightly abridged version of my career history but the point is that I found my way here by accident and I wonder how many of you did too?
W
Better Change has recently celebrated its fourth anniversary and in that time, we have tried to change the narrative around safer gambling and player protection from something that is business limiting into a
24 FEBRUARY 2025
positive force fundamental to both the experience of our players and the future sustainability of our industry.
Far too often the notion of safer gambling is that it is only something that is deployed when something goes wrong. Over the past few years we have actually got particularly good at identifying and reacting to negative behaviours. We have a whole raft of screening tools at our disposable that warn us when a player may be getting into diffi culty, including sophisticated machine learning solutions. We have numerous ways of then trying to contain this behaviour through tools that block, restrict, ban or exclude people from gambling, and for those who need professional support to address gambling related issues we have helplines, treatment services and recovery programmes. In fact the UK Government is looking to raise an estimated £60million for treatment as part of it’s statutory levy for research, prevention and
treatment of gambling harm with the total pot expected to exceed £100million… Great! But from the fi rst safer gambling interaction through to engaging with support services, we are focussing on gambling once it has become a source of harm and managing risk as opposed to pro-actively seeking opportunities. If (and I emphasise the word if!) addressing gambling harm requires this much resource, if there genuinely are millions of people at risk, if gambling helplines are unable to cope with the infl ux of calls and treatment services are full with growing waiting lists, then shouldn’t we (if nothing else) be looking to reduce this burden? If truth be told, the eye watering amounts proposed in the UK levy are more a result of the adverse public opinion of gambling rather than a solid evidence base that this increased funding is needed. To turn this around we as an industry need to go further than just identifying gambling when it has become a source of
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