As the NHS opens its first clinic for child addicts, families are counting the cost of Britain’s high-stakes betting problem
In Jack Ritchie’s first term of sixth form, when he was 17, he started to spend his lunch breaks at the bookies down the road from his school in Sheffield, staking his dinner money at the fixed-odds betting terminals. It became a regular thing. No one ever asked for any proof of age.
Early on, Jack had a big win. It was too much money to fit in his pocket; he had to ask the bookies to hold it for him until he could pick it up after school. “He came home with £1,000 in cash,” his mother, Liz, tells me, blinking in astonishment.
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