Acting now: Glasgow City Council on gambling harms

Just over six years after a committee development day on Gambling Harms was held in my local ward, Shettleston, a second Gambling Summit ‘Standing Strong for a Safer Scotland’ was hosted by Glasgow City Council in late September. Led by the RCA Trust, which supports individuals and communities affected by addiction, gambling harm, and associated challenges, the event was organised in partnership not only with the Council but a wide range of groups and organisations, from Glasgow Life, Fast Forward, GamCare Scotland, Gamble Aware, Cyrenians, Simon Community Scotland, and the John Hartson Recovery Workshop

Much has changed since the initial development day in August 2019 and the two-day Summit in September 2021. Awareness of gambling harms has increased across Scotland’s communities, with many service providers making the connections with debt, depression and suicide, homelessness and other addictions that were not perhaps as obvious before.

The Summit brought together people from across Scotland. Community leaders, frontline workers, researchers, policymakers, and those with lived experience to share knowledge and strengthen our collective efforts to prevent and reduce gambling harms. Participants heard about Simion Community Scotland’s toolkit to address gambling harms and ALIA, a website developed for women by women experiencing harm from gambling.

Speakers included PFA Scotland, the collective voice for football players in Scotland, speaking about industry links; Govan Youth Information Project on gambling’s targeting of young people, and the University of Glasgow Gambling Research Group study highlighting gambling-related harm in retirement and the experiences of those indirectly impacted.

The Scottish Government, a key supporter of both Summits, has committed to approaching gambling as a public health issue with a focus on harm reduction, working alongside the UK Government, which holds the main responsibility for gambling regulation under the Gambling Act 2005.

However, what hasn’t changed enough has been Westminster’s sense of urgency around this matter.

Since the last local elections, as Glasgow’s political lead on gambling harms, the Council has written to the UK Government a number of times, noting the pioneering work being done in the city via the Glasgow Gambling Harms Multi-Agency Group exemplified by an innovative whole-systems action plan. Following the announcement of the gambling levy in December 2024, as noted in my previous LGIU article, I wrote to the UK Government, welcoming the long overdue levy and how Glasgow is best positioned as a city to develop a UK centre of excellence in addressing gambling harms, to fund research, education and treatment of gambling harms. Sadly, there was no response to this, nor the correspondence to the UK Government following a Gambling Harms update to a committee in April 2024, calling for it to review the Gambling Act and ensure that Glasgow was fairly funded to address gambling harms.

As a result, I tabled a successful motion in early September 2025, building on a previous June 2023 motion, highlighting the work in Glasgow and imminent Gambling Harms Summit calling for gambling law reform, including recognition of Scottish anomalies and overall insufficient local powers.

These calls have commendably been taken up by Brent Council in its UK-wide campaign to empower local councils to tackle gambling addiction.

We urgently need reform. We need a public health approach that regulates the industry properly, restricts advertising, prevents harm before it takes hold, and ensures the industry pays its fair share through taxation.

The UK has one of the largest gambling markets in the world. In 2021–22 alone, £14.1 billion was lost to the industry. But these are not abstract figures on a balance sheet. Behind every pound lost is a person. A parent trying to make ends meet. A child growing up in a household burdened by debt. A young person believing their only chance at opportunity lies in luck, not in education, skills, or hard work.

At present, gambling is taxed at just 21%—far below the rates applied across Europe and the United States. Alcohol and tobacco, both of which carry well-recognised public health risks, attract duties of up to 80%. Gambling, by contrast, is exempt from VAT altogether. Meanwhile, the social cost of gambling harms across the UK—borne by councils, the NHS, and public services—is more than £1 billion each year. Here in Glasgow, the estimated annual cost is over £15 million.

And yet, the new statutory levy, if apportioned, would bring at best only a few million to this city. The sums do not add up. Communities like ours in Glasgow are paying the price, while the industry continues to profit handsomely.

In a recent intervention, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who oversaw the 2005 Gambling Act, which liberalised gambling laws and enabled the UK market to become one of the largest in the world, joined the growing calls from public figures, politicians, policy experts and campaigners for tighter regulation and higher taxation of the gambling industry.

Whilst welcome, making the case for taxation of the gambling industry to fund child measures to tackle child poverty overlooked that the gambling has contributed to issues such as child poverty itself. The case for properly taxing the gambling industry in the Autumn 2025 budget must not only fund this but fully fund the cost of gambling harms being picked up by local government and the NHS amongst others that a £100m levy barely touches.

Adopting a whole systems and whole life approach to gambling harms where we recognise that a multi-dimensional approach to reducing harms through early intervention, prevention, and treatment for those who require it, is long overdue. Supported as we do here in Glasgow by a No Wrong Door approach support could be accessed at key touch points throughout an individual’s life encompassing all experiences and stages of life.

However, local authorities and the communities we serve and support must be funded properly and have the powers to do so.

A welcome start to this would be the UK Government listening to the range of voices mobilised and heard here at the Glasgow Summit calling for reform of the Gambling Act and a long overdue meeting with Glasgow City Council to discuss how all levels of government and wider stakeholders and communities can work together to address gambling harms.