Camelot takes teenage gamble

No doubt about it, teenage vice is getting marketers into serious trouble. Tobacco advertising is teetering on abolition; brewers have compromised their reputation with the launch of alcopops; and now we discover the Lottery’s contribution to ‘Good Causes’ is being propped up by under-age punters.

Of course marketers are by no means blameless, but neither are they as responsible for delinquent teenage behaviour as some self-interested politicians and lobbyists would have us believe.

Take the recent Oflot report, which revealed that one in six children had played the Lottery in the preceding week. Whose responsibility is that?

Granted Camelot, the Lottery operator, did itself no great favours by retreating behind its favourite mantra, ‘The Lottery is no more than a harmless flutter’.

Harmless it isn’t, if childhood gambling leads to adult addiction. Nor is the fact that no overt promotion is aimed at the under-aged a sufficient defence of its positioning. The attractions of the Lottery are omnipresent and hardly likely to escape the attention of under-16s.

Nevertheless, Camelot does not draw up the rules; it merely abides by them. And Oflot is there to see it does so. Yet Oflot’s response to its own findings seems lame and rather spineless. It seems Camelot will be obliged to mount a public awareness campaign (whatever that means) and its Lottery outlets are to be subjected to surveillance by under-age snoopers, at Camelot’s discretion.

If Oflot were a more robust regulator, it might have endorsed the idea of raising the age-limit for playing the Lottery to 18. The law, as it stands, places an unreasonable burden on retailers, which could be mitigated. In other words, raising the limit would make it easier to weed out 13-year-old imposters and do something to defuse a contentious issue. It would also square the anomaly of bingo, where absurdly the age of consent is 18.

Oflot director-general Peter Davis will have none of this. Put under pressure in a recent interview on the Today programme, he washed his hands of responsibility, which he said was a matter for the Government. Now, is the very administration which has set up a national institution likely in any way to hamper the commercial success of that institution?

So the likelihood of action, or even debate, is fairly slim. Which could be unfortunate for Camelot later. It could, for example, provide an incoming administration prepared to exploit the populist backlash against ‘delinquent’ teenagers with a convenient scapegoat. It could, in short, provide yet another excuse for ditching the present Lottery operator.

Cover Story, page 30