The harm figures don’t hold, and neither does the man citing them Will Prochaska has written in PoliticsHome (funded rag) that Britain’s gambling market has left “millions of people harmed, communities held back, high streets blighted”. Every part of that sentence is contestable, and the numbers underneath it do not survive scrutiny. Even in the world of Mary a Whitehouse types there ought to be a grain of evidenceThe absurd claim that millions are harmedThe figure derives entirely from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain. Regulus Partners has shown the GSGB overstates participation in some gambling activities by as much as 728 per cent. Its problem gambling estimate of 2.7 per cent is around seven times the 0.4 per cent NHS figure that the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities itself used. Where is the documented rise in actual problem gambling rates to support his fantasies? To accept it, you must also accept that every official gambling statistic produced over seventeen years was substantially wrong, that the NHS has serially misreported the prevalence of health disorders generally, and that audited operator customer data is incorrect.The Commission’s own independent reviewer, Professor Sturgis, found the survey may substantially overstate both gambling and gambling harm errrr. The Commission’s counter-evidence on response bias was debunked by Sturgis and then suppressed, (commission has group 1 form for surpression of inconvenient information) emerging only under Freedom of Information. Its lead advisor, Professor Wardle, had already warned that the dominant effect was over-reporting within the GSGB rather than under-reporting elsewhere. The Commission has conceded the survey’s principal value may lie in trend analysis rather than measuring prevalence.Applied consistently to the same dataset, the methodology makes roughly one million National Lottery customers problem gamblers, at a cost exceeding £6.2 billion.That is the arithmetic on which the harm campaign rests.The claim that high streets are blightedBetting shop numbers have fallen from around 8,995 in 2015 to 5,825 in 2025. The Gambling Commission has confirmed roughly 3,000 closures since 2019 and more than 15,000 jobs lost. Adult Gaming Centres are fewer than they were in 2012 and have not changed materially in a decade.There is no proliferation. There is a contraction, and the regulator has said so publicly.Who is making this argument? Will Prochaska is Director of the Coalition to End Gambling Ads and previously led Gambling with Lives. CEGA states on its own website that it is funded by Las Vegas residing Derek Webb. You know him eh? The same declaration appears in his competing interests statement in the BMJ.Derek Webb made his money inventing casino table games, including three card poker. His campaigning began when he found his game running on fixed odds betting terminals without royalties. He has said publicly that instead of suing he funded a campaign to make his point. He then spent around £3 million making those machines commercially unviable through regulation. He has since given substantial sums to the Labour Party, including £750,000 in 2024 and £300,000 in 2023.So the man calling for the end of gambling advertising is funded by a man who profited from casino gaming and turned to UK regulation after a commercial dispute.That matters for the  Prochaska blurb. He cites the Social Market Foundation as ‘independent corroboration’ of his economic case. The SMF is also funded by Derek Webb! He is not citing external support. He’s one of Webb’s boys. In the clubHis own organisation’s website relies on the OHID estimate of gambling-related deaths in England. That is the same OHID analysis the Office for Statistics Regulation has said cannot be used to support causal claims, and which OHID’s own Director-General has stepped back from. Because it’s almost entirely a work of fiction. None of this is hidden. CEGA declares its funding openly. The problem is not secrecy. It is that a campaign funded by one man keeps citing itself as evidence, and Parliament keeps treating it as an excuse to be worthy.