A bit of a bombshell hit when suddenly my son told me that he was in some financial trouble. And when we sat down and said, “Well, why?” at that time, it was a case of debt on credit cards etc. He mentioned that he’d started to gamble. And I just sort of said to him, “Well, stop it,” thinking that could be done quite simply.

We were going to GamAnon, which is the family support version of GA. We dragged my son there basically and said, “right, you’re going, non-negotiable”. I think he went there for us. He’d been a couple of times before that, but with no real conviction but then something clicked for him.

The products, the online casino, the in-play gambling, fixed-odds betting terminals, all the stuff that’s highly addictive is what he got into. I’ve got a couple of his DSARs back and for someone who wasn’t earning a lot of money he had in some of his accounts up to £80,000/£90,000. If you look at how much he wagered, not how much he’d lost. But he was winning £30,000 putting £20,000 back and then cashing in and there was reverse withdrawals.

I think it’s unfair for me to comment about treatment but for us it wasn’t effective. It wasn’t until we got to GamAnon where we actually spoke with people who got what we were talking about. We isolated ourselves. We never spoke to anyone about it. We carried it all on our own and then when we got GamAnon and were surrounded by people who had that genuine empathy for us rather than that insincere sympathy is when our recovery started.

If you think he was, he was allowed to open up an account with Leo Vegas. They closed him down because he was making suicidal comments on their chat. To my knowledge, they never did a welfare check, but they might have done but I doubt it. And then six, seven months later he’s allowed to open up an account with a subsidiary with the same name, same email, same home address, and then deposit 20 grand in a day. That’s outrageous.

And when you hear now 5% of gamblers account for 60% of profit. And then if you look online, that 5% is nearly 90%. The business model that these companies are running on is just incredible. It shouldn’t be allowed and then they’re allowed to be responsible for their own messaging. Safer gambling, responsible gambling, what a load of nonsense that is. Anyone with a gambling disorder it makes no difference. Anyone who hasn’t got a gambling disorder doesn’t listen to it anyway.

Gambling advertising is just everywhere now. It’s just been normalized, every time you put the TV you see advertising on football. There’s a new demographic of women gamblers that they’re targeting now. The younger generation now, if you look at any of them, they’re all on their phones, always watching football. It means more when there’s money it. That type of messaging is just it’s just awful.

The trouble is, as parents, we had no idea. We had no idea that gambling was so toxic. It had gone from a day at the races when I was younger, that was our gambling. And to put a bet on you had to go into a shop. But now because of the mobile technology it’s completely changed. And everyone’s addicted to their phones now anyway. But you don’t know what people are getting up to when they’re on their phones.

He had £5 of his own money and asked me to put this £5 on for him. Six teams, something like that. Different European teams and whatever, and that first bet he won. He won £40 or £50. Because he was quite knowledgeable about that type of football, he got a bit of enjoyment out of that and I thought, great, a chip off the old block, something we could do together. Little did I know that two years later, his journey would be completely different to anything I’ve ever experienced.

When he turned 18, what happened was he then started getting loans out, payday loans. He maxed out his Barclaycard. That account got defaulted. But because my wife and I were out working, we had no idea what post was coming to the home. When we were here when the post came, he would always run down and get it and then bring two letters down so we didn’t know there were three or four letters there. Obviously, he was very, very good and resourceful at hiding it and covering it.

I think as a dad you go into rescue mode, don’t you? And you try and solve it and you try to solve it logically by paying him off and bailing him out, different things that went on. And then you get angry, and then you get frustrated because you couldn’t solve the problem. When really, it wasn’t my problem to solve. Going to GamAnon and realising that I had no control over my son’s gambling was probably the start point of our recovery.

By accessing structured peer support, and I mean going beyond six to 10 sessions of counselling, I’m talking about long term to medium term aftercare has enabled us to really, really work as a family. And I would say now we are very, very fortunate that as a family now, we’re in a better place than we are pre gambling. But we don’t take that for granted. We know tomorrow could easily go the other way. But look, if he did gamble tomorrow, I’d like to think with what we’ve learned is it would just be a blip and we would now be better equipped to deal with it and we wouldn’t be going back to day zero.

All these barriers in isolation are as good as a chocolate fire guard because they can all be got round. However, if you put them together and you’ve got a suite of controls and barriers in place, they’re not only there to protect my son, they’re also there to manage my anxiety as well so that I’m not spending 24-7 worrying about has he gambled?

Lived experience peer support is such a valuable part of our recovery. I can’t emphasise that enough. You can take the most highly trained counsellors, therapists, doctors, whatever it was, in our experience they did not work for our situation. And our doctor put our son on medication and when he lowered his dosage he said it doesn’t mean to say that you can gamble again does it. What a thing to say to somebody. There was no empathy there whatsoever. We had the police round on three or four occasions. They were great but had no idea what to say or do. All they were doing was just looking at it as a safeguarding issue, and if he was safe and we were safe, their job was done. And that was no criticism of the police. It’s just a lack of understanding.

I think we need to take a public health approach and for people to understand that gambling is highly addictive and how the industry operates. The classic example at the moment are these new adverts take time to tap out, set your limits, blah blah blah, blah blah. People say to me isn’t it great that they’re doing that now. That’s a load of old bollocks, excuse my language, because they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near that messaging. They should be a million miles away from it. If their business is to make money, then that’s fine. That’s what gambling is. But they shouldn’t be sending out their own safer gambling messages. The gambling commission needs to regulate it properly.

When people start with sports betting they get cross-sold these online games. You can’t even watch a game of football or darts or anything like that with not being constantly bombarded with betting, in-play gambling.

In an ideal world, if you want to buy a pack of cigarettes, you know where to go to buy a pack of cigarettes, you don’t need it to be advertised. And the same should be for gambling. If you want to gamble, then you know where to go and put a bet on. You know how to put a bet on. The things like free bets, these offers that they give – it breaks your heart when you hear people that they’ve been off a bet for three months or so and keep getting bombarded with advertising. So, I think these free bets and incentives and these ridiculous incentivised odds they give you to get you back in gambling again, I think need to be banned.

One that I would like to see the age go up of 21 because the theory is that your brain develops at the age of 25 etc. But if it was 21 it would just make it more difficult for those university students at 18 going to uni and people starting work as well. And hopefully, as you get older, you may be less likely to take those risks. Maybe, maybe not. But when you take someone going to uni as an example, give them £3000 for them for their loan, never shown any interest in gambling and all of a sudden start university and in the first term, they spend all their money gambling then they drop out of university. You hear lots and lots of stories of that.