‘There will be more people dying’: mother whose daughter took own life criticises gambling white paper

theguardian.com:

Just minutes after Kay Wadsworth got a call to say that her daughter Kimberly had died after a struggle with gambling addiction, a roulette advert blared on her television.

“I could have got that TV and thrown it off my balcony, I was so angry about it,” she recalls.

Kimberly was 32 when she took her own life in 2018. Wadsworth says that in the years leading up to that point her daughter had been bombarded with adverts and marketing that normalised and encouraged her addiction to gambling.

Kay, 68, had hoped that a long-awaited white paper on gambling published on Thursday would bring in sweeping restrictions on the industry’s techniques for luring in and keeping vulnerable customers such as Kimberly. But she is bitterly disappointed.

There are no immediate plans to curb traditional advertising and many other areas of proposed regulation will only be consulted on. There isconcern among MPs that putting so much out to consultation at a time of legislative backlog is likely to result in little change.

“It’s not anywhere near enough,” Kay says. “It needs to be done now, with proper legislation put in place. Not just consulting on it.”

She believes that instead of slogans such as “take time to think” appearing after clips promoting gambling, such adverts should be banned altogether, “because it’s killed my daughter, and it’s killed [others] over a long period of time”.

Kimberly had worked in marketing and her mother remembers her as “full of life and very, very funny”. She had started out going to casinos in Leeds where she lived, but by the time she ended her life she was hooked on online blackjack and other games.

“She permanently had her phone by the side of her,” Kay says. “If I walked into her bedroom, that was the first thing