IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon has spoken to The Racing Post about the government’s plans to introduce ‘frictionless’ background checks for gamblers as part of their Gambling White Paper.

Christopher said:

“My sense of it is the government doesn’t really know how to achieve its goal. We’ve seen this in a lot of government policy areas over the last few years; the stuff on so-called junk food, for example.

“I think they’ve realised frictionless checks are a bit of a myth insofar as you can check for a County Court Judgement (CCJ) or something like that, and that’s frictionless, but where is that going to get you?

“You’re not realistically going to ban someone for gambling just because they’ve had a business go bust in the past or they had a CCJ when they were 18. The question has always been where do we go from there?”

Read the full article here.