Gordon Brown is right to call for a fair and targeted tax on the excessive profits of the gambling industry to help tackle child poverty (The gambling industry is a licence to print money. Tax it properly – and turbocharge the fight against child poverty, 6 August). This policy supports our shared goals of delivering sustainable public finances alongside improved public health outcomes as well as the government’s manifesto pledges to reduce gambling-related harms and alleviate child poverty.
This £11.5bn sector benefits enormously from VAT exemptions and pays just 21% tax – far below the 35%-57% rates elsewhere in western Europe and the US. By contrast, other harmful products like cigarettes and alcohol are taxed at up to 80%. At the same time, gambling leads to harms that cost the NHS and other services well over £1bn a year.
The government must not be swayed by intensive lobbying and false claims of economic harm or the threat of illegal gambling from the gambling industry, which will of course resist these proposals.
Instead, ahead of the child poverty review, the government must seize the opportunity in the next budget to tax a social harm to pay for a social good.
Alex Ballinger MP
Labour, Halesowen
Dr Beccy Cooper MP
Labour, Worthing West
• The raising of taxes should go hand in glove with a move towards a full advertising ban of gambling, like Gordon Brown’s government did with tobacco. The new customer incentives are obscene. You wouldn’t get away with offering new customers a free packet of cigarettes, and neither should gambling companies get away with similar cash offers.
Of course, the gambling industry will resist, as did tobacco before it, but the sky did not fall on our heads and other advertisers were found to fill the gaps, as they always will be.
William Bartram
Hampton, London
• Gordon Brown’s article makes no mention of horse racing, which is a totally different form of gambling to online slots and, if his ideas are applied, will enter a terminal death spiral of diminishing returns, as your own correspondent Greg Wood has eloquently argued for years. By all means tax casinos and slots, but please exclude the one sport in which this country leads the world, not only in staging but also in competing.
I also seem to recall that Brown was chancellor in the Blair government that deregulated the gambling industry, thereby ensuring that our seaside resorts and city centres are now home to casinos and the many slot machine arcades that blight our high streets – a thoroughly regrettable development on every level.
Brown’s proposals will have unintended consequences and do little to alleviate poverty.
Tim Harrison
London
• It is unfortunate that Gordon Brown fails to mention that Scotland is the only place in the UK where child poverty has fallen in recent years. This is due largely to the Scottish child payment of £27.15 a week per child to eligible families.
This does not fully mitigate the effect of the two-child benefit cap, but is a good example of what small countries with constrained budgets can achieve. The UK government should be ashamed of its failure to learn from Scotland and act more swiftly on reducing child poverty.
Shelagh Young
Edinburgh
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