By Living Room correspondent "Bernie"
Recently, The Guardian newspaper published an article exposing the hypocrisy of the brothers Fred (pictured above) and Peter Done, who own Betfred, one of the largest UK high street bookmakers with 1,650 shops. They also own "Health Assured", a business that provides treatment to public sector staff, under government contracts, for a range of health issues, including gambling addiction.
Here at The Living Room, we see daily the effects that problematic gambling, encouraged by businesses like Betfred, has on gambling addicts, their families and friends. And we have to fight for every single penny of funding that we get, from a variety of social funds. You can imagine how we felt when we read that not only are the Done brothers making a huge fortune (£1.25 billion at the last count) on the back of gambling addiction, they are also making a huge profit treating the problem they have helped create, receiving £5.2 million in dividends from Health Assured in the past three years.
One might imagine that any government, of any colour, would spot the cynicism and hypocrisy in this flawed arrangement, and take appropriate steps to stop the haemorrhaging of public money to private coffers, at least while some sort of investigation was carried out into the propriety of such an arrangement. During the same period referred to in the previous paragraph, the Done brothers have donated £375,000 to the Conservative party.
The chief of mental health service provision in the NHS, Claire Murdoch, recently wrote to the big gambling companies, expressing her concern at the effects of gambling addiction: -
"As the head of England’s mental health services and a nurse of more than 30 years’ experience, I have seen first-hand the devastating impact on mental wellbeing of addiction and am concerned that the prevalence of gambling in our society is causing harm."
The politically-independent online media site The Canary published a similar article last week, and succinctly portrayed the situation thus: -
"So even if NHS workers aren’t raising any personal gambling issues with Health Assured during counselling, the fact remains that the NHS itself is trying to help fix a problem created in no small part by the “tactics” of the gambling industry. And the government is splurging taxpayers’ cash on a business whose owners are a major player in that industry."
Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth MP also commented: -
"Addiction, whether from gambling, drinks or drugs, is a growing mental and public health emergency in society. Of course all NHS staff should have access to mental and wellbeing support but this looks like an unacceptable conflict of interest. Corporate gambling interests should be nowhere near our health services like this."
Iain Duncan Smith MP, who co-chairs a cross-party group on gambling, added: -
“The whole process strikes me as somewhat cynical. You create a problem and then you get paid to try and solve it. At every turn, the only thing that matters to gambling companies is to find more ways to make money off the same people.”
The extraordinary profits of the gambling industry are the product of over a decade of deregulation, allied with digital technologies that were not anticipated in 2005 when the last Gambling Act was passed.
The recent emergence of gambling addiction as a major social crisis and its resultant elevation in the media has forced politicians of both parties to take action (maximum stakes on FOBTs for example), but the decision to use Health Assured raises questions about the close relationship the industry has traditionally enjoyed in government circles.