My father went to prison for what he did to feed his gambling addiction – why won't the government do more?

We talk about the hundreds of thousands of people with a gambling addiction in this country but we forget the families. In our case, my father’s addiction affected him, me, my mum, my two brothers, our extended family, our community and his employer

The gambling industry has turned to online advertising to prime young people to be long-term users (PA)

Thursday’s landmark ruling by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has slashed the stakes on highly addictive Fixed Odds Betting Terminals from the staggering £100 every 20 seconds to £2.

I am personally delighted by this decision, because I’ve been campaigning for these sorts of changes for years. My father David, now 61, spent time in prison after concealing his gambling habit from everyone. He stole £53,000 from his employers after making his way through a destructive roller coaster of payday loans, bank loans, credit cards and borrowing. He even remortgaged our family home in secret to keep his addiction from us.

This is an important point. We talk about the hundreds of thousands of people with a gambling addiction in this country but we forget the families. In our case, my father’s addiction affected him, me, my mum, my two brothers, our extended family, our community and his employer. Dozens of other people are affected both emotionally and financially by gambling-related problems; the knock-on effects are massive. Figures today estimated the cost of gambling addiction damage to Britain could be somewhere close to £1bn.

Firms pounded my dad’s inbox with thousands of emails enticing him to bet while he was behind bars and some even sent premium-rate text messages to him in a bid to bring him back to gamble with them. This harassment of gamblers through non-stop advertising on TV, radio and online is insidious and, I think, needs to stop.

While the government ruling, which comes at the end of a bitter argument between prime minister Theresa May, culture secretary Matt Hancock and MP Tracey Crouch, is progress, it’s still weak in some key areas.

We are taking gambling addiction off the high streets and sending it online. The government has missed a trick. The Gambling Commission last year reported that online gambling was a growing area and that 18- to 24-year-olds would suffer the most as the area continues to grow. Advertising techniques used by the industry entice youngsters into betting from a young age, further acclimatising them to their products in an effort to transform them into long-term customers.

According to the charity GambleAware, 50 per cent of all gambling is now conducted online. Its report from summer last year also showed that young men who are unemployed were most at risk of developing a gambling problem through the internet.

I have had countless social media adverts targeted at me online because I’ve been talking about gambling. Ironically enough, in those conversations I’ve been talking about the pervasive problem of gambling addiction.

There was a 600 per cent rise in gambling adverts between 2007 and 2014, according to research by Ofcom. I have no doubt that their pervasiveness, links to football games and heavy sponsorship of sports matches will encourage a new generation of gamblers, once fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) are no longer the gambling machines of choice. This is where the government has been short-sighted. It has assessed actual harm rather than potential for harm in its report, and has taken a long time to come up with its toothless recommendation that the industry should run its own responsible gambling campaign.

I have no problem with gambling on our high streets or indeed with it being legal in our country. What I do have a problem with is an industry that has grown too big, too quickly, without decent legislation to minimise the harm such addictive products can bring. Now the industry has said that thousands of job losses will follow the government’s announcement and many bookmakers may have to close their stores – but, quite frankly, I don’t believe them.

Successive governments have failed gambling addicts; it is, after all, the Labour administration that deregulated this industry in the first place. Now Tom Watson MP, shadow secretary for culture, media and sport, strongly supports further regulation in the industry and recognises the damage these machines and online gambling can cause. Labour is clearly changing its tune after its MPs see the consequences of former policies.

A leisure industry like gambling should not be able to take a life with it, like that of my dad or those of my family members. It should not be able to dominate the high streets or online websites either. In my hometown of Sheffield, there is one square with close to a dozen betting shops in it all in a very close proximity – does that seem ethical or responsible? The industry is under scrutiny now and this regulation is only the start of what I hope will be a raft of strict measures to ensure gambling no longer causes the sort of misery so many of us have been forced to endure.