Bet365 ‘guilty of harming city it celebrates itself for helping’

Stoke-on-Trent, the home of gambling giant Bet365, is reportedly suffering the consequences of the company’s enormous growth.

Writing for The Guardian, business reporter Rob Davies said the city’s gambling harms clinic faces a “colossal task” in attempting to deal with the industry’s “collateral damage”.

And in a letter to the same newspaper, a local employee admitted struggling with the thought that staff were benefiting from “the massive harm that gambling causes” among people who live in “deprived areas such as Stoke-on-Trent”.

Harms clinic

In his feature exploring how Bet365 founder Denise Coates became Britain’s wealthiest woman, Davies argues that the company, founded in Stoke in 2000, “transformed the British gambling landscape” by making it possible to place bets online “any hour of day or night”.

Coates’s online sports betting company sponsors Stoke City FC, which is owned by her father John, and Bet365 is one of the biggest employers in the area.

While Coates donates millions to local causes, Davies writes that the NHS funded West Midlands Gambling Harms Clinic counts former Bet365 customers among its clients.

He observes: “The annual budget for all 15 new NHS clinics is just £6.75m. Or, to put it another way, less than a day’s worth of revenue at Bet365.”

Unethical

In response to the article, one local Bet365 employee told The Guardian that the “success of the company presents an ethical quandary”.

The correspondent, who wished to remain anonymous, asked: “as employees, are we benefiting from the exploitation and suffering of those vulnerable to addiction? Are gambling addicts paying our wages?”

The letter writer also said: “Coates is evidently an intelligent, business-savvy and driven woman. One could say that it is a shame that such a brilliant mind has been dedicated to an industry that can have such deleterious outcomes”.

In conclusion, they wondered how “a company that has such pride in where it comes from can ultimately harm a city that it celebrates itself for helping”.