Child Lottery Player Figures Decline
22nd July, 2009
A survey of 9,000 children across England, Scotland and Wales has found that the amount of 12-15 year olds that illegally buy lottery tickets, has fallen to its lowest level in over 10 years, due to Camelot’s introduction of rigorous child protection measures.
The study, by Ipsos MORI's Social Research Institute and the Centre for the Study of Gambling, found that children who had spent their own money on tickets in the past 7days, dropped from 5% to 2% since 2006. Only 4% of children had bought scratch cards down from 9%.
Online restrictions have shown to be even more successful; of the 96% percent of children that had been online during the previous week 0.3% of them had spent money on the national Lottery’s games.
The Chair of the National Lottery Commission, Dr Anne Wright CBE commented: "This continuing decline in underage play shows that an effective regulatory framework together with a socially responsible operator makes it very difficult for children to access National Lottery products".
However the report stresses that there is no room for complacency and that Camelot need to continue to strive to prevent the small percentage of children that do play from accessing their games.
One area of focus is the link between those that gamble for free on social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo and those that play with real money offline. This is because the survey found that 56% of those that had gambled with their own money had also played free online games.
By Faye
