Can you find a link for me if it’s not hard?
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63bc25b4d3bf7...
This looks fairly official and cites 1.05 to 1.77 billion £ in societal cost on page 6. That’s less than 14 billion £.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63bc25b4d3bf7...
This looks fairly official and cites 1.05 to 1.77 billion £ in societal cost on page 6. That’s less than 14 billion £.
That’s looking at harm specifically not economic costs.
Direct taxes to the state are £3.3 billion, but that also ignores missing tax revenue both directly from people spending money on gambling instead of other activities and missing revenue from that economic harm.
So offsetting ~1.5 billion in harm is an optimistic net gain of 0.7 billion in tax revenue.
And I’m not even saying that gambling is fine or should be supported, I was just sceptical of the claim that the damages exceed the income.
It’s one of those things where yes people are forking over 14 billion per year, but that’s because they have 14 billion which would otherwise be spent on something else. Even just VAT on 14 billion gets close to the total tax revenue from UK gambling especially when you include other economic losses.
So where’s the benefit?
"Looking from a wider societal perspective, there are a range of costs that have not, or have only been partially quantified here (such as crime, education, cultural harms, impacts on relationships and wider impacts on the families of gamblers). For these reasons, we believe the figures of £412.9 million and £635 to £1,355.5 million to be an underestimate of the true scale of the total economic burden associated with harmful gambling."
you caught me in a bad mood, and I was sure of something and i was wrong.
i still think it is perverse to argue in favor of gambling companies - an "industry" that is at best zero sum, simply reallocating money from one hand to an arguably less deserving hand. but in practice is dramatically negative sum when families are torn apart.