The new UK Financial Inclusion Strategy is a welcome step forward. It recognises the scale of exclusion in the UK and makes an important commitment: financial education will become compulsory in primary schools in England – hopefully building confidence with money early in life, before people are juggling rent, childcare, debt, or pension choices.
But people can understand interest rates and still be unable to save because of low pay, insecure work, care, disability, or rising living costs. Financial capability is essential, but it should be seen as stage one, not the destination.
One omission illustrates the gap. I had lunch on Tuesday with the excellent Laurie Edmans, who pointed out something striking: the word gambling does not appear anywhere in the strategy. That is a serious oversight, given the scale of its financial impact, especially on people who are already struggling:
- Around half of adults in Great Britain gamble in some form (Gambling Commission)
- 1.6 million adults in England are likely to need some level of gambling-related treatment or support (Landman Economics)
- Over 900,000 children live in households where an adult’s gambling may require treatment or support (Landman Economics)
The distribution of harm is not random. Data from the Health Survey for England (2016) shows that adults in the most deprived areas are seven times more likely to be problem gamblers than those in the least deprived areas (1.5% vs 0.2%). And analysis by Landman Economics shows that gambling absorbs over 3% of disposable income for households in the lowest income quartile, compared with 0.6% for the richest.
That is money that cannot go into emergency savings, debt repayment, or pension contributions. If we are serious about improving financial resilience, reducing problem debt and increasing long-term saving, then gambling must be treated not only as a public health issue, but as a financial inclusion issue.
Alongside loan shark use, debt advice uptake and access to affordable credit, we need to track gambling behaviour and related financial harm, because it directly competes with the goals this strategy sets out: saving, stability, resilience, and pension adequacy.
Financial inclusion will only properly materialise if we look not just at how people should use money, but at what is actively pulling money away from them, including gambling, alongside the already-recognised pressures of high-cost credit, low savings, income volatility, and wider economic inequality.
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