Jack Horgan-Jones

Morning, David.

Yeah, it's a fairly all-guns-blazing attack on the practice of this so-called secondary market in lottery betting that is coming from the National Lottery.

And the numbers involved are pretty seismic, actually.

I was kind of really taken aback when I was reading the research yesterday

And they were describing the scale of betting that goes on through bookmakers and online on the National Lottery, but not on the National Lottery proper.

They say that the total market is worth about 828 million euros every year and that they think that if

that market didn't exist, about 35% of that money would make its way to the national lottery and that works out to something in the region of 289 million euros of which they say 81 million euros would make its way to good causes were it not spent in bookmakers.

They're effectively asking the government to ban the practice outright and they are worried that the first raft of gambling licenses

which are going to be issued later this year by the regulatory authority, will make it in effect legal.

They're saying it's currently operating in a space where it's neither illegal or explicitly legal in a kind of grey zone.

And they think that if it was to be made fully legal, it would grow and you'd have bookmakers investing in more advertising, more kind of product innovation and

it would go from a space where effectively it's in and around the same size as the National Lottery now.

Again, a fairly stark statistic there to a place where it could actually be significantly larger.

It is.

So apparently the amount of money that is spent through retailers every year on the lottery, so that would be your supermarket or your newsagent, is something like 700 million.

So I'm presuming there's a bit more spent on the National Lottery proper

online, which takes up to more than the 828 million.

But just the fact that you have a kind of secondary or synthetic market of this scale is quite significant.

They're also, they being the National Lottery, are also citing research that they've done, which suggests that a fair amount of people who play in the bookmakers or in online bookmakers, they actually believe that they're playing the National Lottery itself.

I have, yeah.