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A Spanish gambling trade association has taken aim at state-run and charity lotteries, claiming they need to improve their responsible gambling efforts and better protect minors.
CeJuego, which claims to represent around 70 percent of the private gambling sector in Spain, made the statement in its analysis of the Behavioural Addictions Report 2021, published by the Ministry of Health.
Alejandro Landaluce, CEO of CeJuego, said the figures in the report “corroborate what we have been saying for years”.
“Face-to-face private gaming is decreasing every year, despite attempts to make people believe otherwise. The gambling figures, if analysed as a whole, have a positive trend, but it is when analysed by type of game, it is clear that this growth comes from public gambling, that is, from state lotteries and scratchcards and the Organización Nacional de Ciegos Españoles (ONCE).”
CeJuego’s argument centres on the fact that 15 and 64 year-olds increased the amount they spent on gambling between 2018 and 2020, in lotteries, pools and instant lotteries, as well as on video games, while amounts wagered on sports betting, bingo halls and gaming halls declined.
“Public games continue to be the modalities that people with a possible disorder play the most, such as lotteries (82.6 percent) or scratchcards (52.9 percent). Only scratchcards, horseracing and video games show a growth trend compared to 2018,” CeJuego said.
The addiction report says that “face-to-face gambling is much more widespread since more than half of the population aged 15 to 64 (63.6 percent in 2020) has gambled in the last year, mostly through conventional and instant lottery games”.
“The prevalence of possible problematic gambling, possible compulsive use of the internet and use of video games in students between 14 and 18 years of age highlight the importance of intensifying prevention activities from various fields,” the report concludes.
In 2020, 1.6 percent of the population, aged 15 to 64 years could be classed as possible problematic gamblers and 0.6 percent could be classed as having a possible gambling disorder, according to the latest survey.
ONCE is a Spanish charity lottery. Loterías y Apuestas del Estado (LAE) is the country’s state-run lottery operator, which is overseen by the Ministry of Finance. At the time of writing, neither had responded to request for comment.
