Northern Ireland inter-party group calls for higher taxes to curb gambling-related harm

The Northern Ireland Assembly’s All-Party Group on Reducing Harm Related to Gambling has called on the Chancellor to increase gambling taxes.

The group has written an open letter to the Chancellor calling for higher taxes on online gambling to raise funds to reduce gambling-related harm. It’s estimated that a tax change could raise £2 billion ($2.6 billion) in revenue.

https://twitter.com/GamHarmAPG/status/1986027870527902156/

This comes in response to plans from the Treasury to ‘harmonize’ tax rates for different forms of online gambling, which the group believes would only encourage companies away from sports betting to even more addictive and potentially harmful online casino and slot games.

“The evidence clearly shows that remote gaming products, such as online slots and casino games, are far more harmful than remote betting,” wrote APG Chairperson Philip McGuigan in the letter. “The British Government should not be seeking to harmonise the rate at which these types of remote gambling are taxed.

“It should instead use the upcoming Budget to increase the tax rates on remote gambling to offset the societal costs of the harms associated with it, which are estimated to cost the Exchequer in excess of £1 billion annually.”

The letter is backed by data-driven recommendations from two think tanks, the Social Market Foundation and the Institute for Public Policy Research. The group proposes instead to raise the Remote Gaming Duty to 50% and the General Betting Duty to 25%, in a move estimated to raise up to £2 billion in revenue that could go towards social responsibility measures, while also discouraging the most addictive forms of online gambling.

This comes after the alarm was raised in Northern Ireland earlier this year that 3% of the population are already facing serious harm from gambling, while another 10% are at a low to moderate risk. Indeed, players in Northern Ireland are not protected by the same regulations as the rest of the UK, while also experiencing the highest rate of problem gambling in the country.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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