GambleAware Wins the Battle, but is the War Already Lost?

I would dearly love to celebrate the news of the Good Law Project’s claim being shot down by the charity regulator as Jordan Lea and so many others rightly will. This is the right outcome to a bogus complaint being submitted for what was to my mind entirely partisan political reasons. This was never a legitimate complaint. It was an effort to engage a media circus to further other objectives.

Why am I not celebrating? Because I feel that despite the complaint getting shot down, the Good Law Project has likely won. I’d direct everyone’s attention to the quote from Hannah Greer at the end of the cited article [link in the comments]:

“The Charity Commission’s assurance that GambleAware’s industry funding does not impact on decisions about its activities is at odds with the NHS, which has refused to accept funding from GambleAware for their gambling harm treatment clinics since 2022.”

And therein lies the rub.

Whilst the administration of the incoming levy hasn’t been finalised at this stage, all indications point towards the NHS taking over commissioning of this funding pot. And all signs at this time indicate that the NHS is going to take a hardline approach, refusing to allow any organisation that has received funding of any form from the industry to access levy funding.

So GambleAware may have been exonerated in the eyes of the charity commission, but they, as with the vast majority of the 3rd sector, are likely to find that rather than improved funding levels after the shift from RET to levy, they now face significant barriers to future funding.

The apparent attitudes of the decision-makers in the NHS on this matter defy any reason or logic. They are blinkered irrationality at its most obvious. They effectively assert that the entire 3rd sector, which has supported hundreds of thousands of people over the last decade, has been irreparably corrupted by insidious industry funding.

What do these people think is actually going on? Do they believe that when Gordon Moody finishes treating a patient that they hand them a free spins bonus code on the way out of the door? Do they think that when GamCare finishes a call with someone who has contacted them for support, that they suggest they might relieve some stress by placing a few bets online? ?

Of course this isn’t happening. Where this extremist attitude is actually coming from is a divergence between the charitable purposes of an organisation and the polarised and extreme political views of a minority of the voices in the sector. I would again point to Hannah Greer’s statement in the referenced article:

“A gambling charity committed to helping people and holding the industry to account should be shining a light on the gambling companies’ predatory tactics and highlighting the fact that 60% of profits come from the 5% of customers classified as ‘problem gamblers’ or ‘at risk’.”

And the truth is revealed. A chasmic leap in logic. An organisation may have a charitable objective of reducing poverty or social hardship via the treatment or prevention of gambling harms, which they achieve via education or treatment, or like BetBlocker by providing a free app. But if the organisation isn’t speaking out in the ‘right’ ways then by the standards set out above they are not “committed to helping people”.

It doesn’t matter that the charitable objectives of an organisation, the core founding principals outlining what that organisation is trying to achieve, do not mention campaigning for change. It doesn’t matter that being “committed to helping people” is a term that will mean different things to different people. It doesn’t even matter that the organisation may be having a huge positive impact on the lives of thousands of people. Unless the organisation is seen as being sufficiently aggressive in their language and rhetoric about the industry, the purveyors of these attitudes hold that they are an organisation who should be attacked and derided, to the point of making legal challenges to try and have them shutdown, or simply defunded entirely.

This is not in any way about the services delivered or minimising social harm. It’s entirely political and simply about appeasing the most partisan voices in the spectrum.

And that is why I don’t feel much like celebrating. The battle may have been won against the Good Law Project’s baseless claim, but unless there are significant changes in the NHS’s attitude towards the 3rd sector in the UK, far from the levy being a boon for the protection of vulnerable people what we’re about to see is a cataclysmic loss of service as many hard-working projects delivering invaluable societal good are defunded for not taking a strong enough political position to appease the zealots.