Recommendations

This final report includes recommendations linked to four priorities: developing a strategic approach to gambling-related crime; enhancing the role of criminal justice agencies; integrating gambling-related crime into broader government action on gambling harms; and commissioning further research. 
 
The recommendations include a call for better screening and assessment processes at multiple points of the criminal justice process and a mandatory requirement that, where gambling-related harms or potential gambling addiction are identified, pre-sentence reports are completed to advise the court on appropriate sentencing options that include support and treatment pathways. 
 
The Commission also recommends that the voices of people with lived experience of gambling harms related to crime, including those affected by the gambling of others, should be integral to the development of guidance, training and support. 
 
There are a set of specific recommendations aimed at the Ministry of Justice, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Sentencing Council, the Judicial College and His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, in respect of changes they could make to improve their handling of cases linked to gambling. 
 
Finally, the Commission recommends that a joint Parliamentary select committee should be established to scrutinise cross-government action on gambling-related harms and its links to crime. In the longer term, this work could be continued by a group comprising government ministers, departmental leads and other organisations – a model similar to the existing Deaths in Custody Ministerial Group.

The report also raises the issue of the inappropriate confiscation of assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act, which can have a hugely detrimental and fundamentally unfair impact on the families of problem gamblers. The POCA legislation was primarily aimed at organised crime groups who hid their profits from drug dealing and other activities by buying property, expensive cars etc. It seems patently unfair to apply the same legislation to people who have mainly committed crime to fund their gambling and therefore have no assets from their illegal activity but are forced to lose family homes and face being in debt for the rest of their lives.

Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the images in this post. You can see Andy’s work here