There is a particular species of anti-gambling expert who can explain, for ninety minutes and with slides, why you must never back a horse. Ask him what 7-2 means and he looks at you like a cat being shown a card trick. Ask what an each-way bet is and he'll tell you it's a gender-neutral cycle lane, and that Hackney is consulting on one.

He is not a bad man. He is, however, the man now deciding how you may spend a tenner on a Saturday, and his central belief is that gambling is one thing. A £2 flutter on the Grand National, a £500 bet by someone who has spent four evenings on the form, and an online slot that spins every 2.5 seconds are, to him, members of the same crime family. By that logic so are a bicycle, a combine harvester and a Tomahawk cruise missile. They all move. Ban the lot and let God sort out the traffic.

His favourite weapon is the Problem Gambling Severity Index. It was invented in Canada, a nation so polite it apologises to its own moose, and it shows: it is essentially nine apologies with a scoring system. Each answer is marked from nought to three. Score eight out of 27 and you're in the top box, labelled "problem gambling". It is a population screen, a smoke alarm, and emphatically not a doctor in a white coat. That distinction matters. It is about as welcome in certain campaign offices as a vegetarian at a hog roast.

The Gambling Commission's latest survey questioned 20,775 adults and found 2.4 per cent scored eight or more. That's about 1.3 million people. It deserves investigation, not a sneer. But it is not a headcount of 1.3 million clinically diagnosed addicts, and the Commission itself says the survey must not be used as a measure of addiction. Which is like a restaurant printing "may not contain food" on the menu, and the whole of Westminster ordering it anyway.

So let's open the questionnaire. Pens ready. Feelings ready.

Question time, or how to diagnose a vicar

One. Have you bet more than you could really afford to lose? "Really" is doing more heavy lifting than a Glasgow removal man on a fourth-floor flat with no lift. A duke can lose twenty grand at Ascot without selling a Gainsborough. A student loses £8 and must choose between a kebab and the bus home. The question has spotted something real. It has also discovered that being skint is a gambling disorder.

Two. Have you needed to bet larger amounts for the same excitement? Sometimes that's a warning sign. Sometimes your betting bank has grown, or a Mars bar now costs what a three-course lunch did in 1987. When a fund manager increases his position, he gets a bonus and a box at Twickenham. When a punter does it, someone reaches for a safeguarding leaflet.

Three. Have you gone back another day to win back what you lost? Chasing is real and dangerous. But there is a difference between doubling up to recover the rent and backing a horse again because last time it was boxed in behind three carthorses at Wolverhampton. One is a spiral. The other is reading the form. The questionnaire can't tell them apart, because the questionnaire thinks a furlong is a Swedish sofa.

Four. Have you borrowed money or sold something to gamble? Fair enough. This one is good. If the telly has been pawned to fund a Tuesday night bet at Southwell, you may need help. Unless it was showing party conference season, in which case you've made a sound household decision.

Five. Have you felt you might have a gambling problem? I have felt I might have a problem with cheese, council parking meters and anyone who says "going forward". None of these feelings has been entered into the national statistics, which is a pity, because the cheese one is serious.

Six. Has gambling caused you health problems, including stress or anxiety? Well, yes. The last furlong at Cheltenham can turn a healthy adult into a man defusing a bomb in oven gloves. But that stress ends when the race does, and frankly it's why we go. Asking a punter whether betting made him anxious is like asking someone coming off the Big One at Blackpool whether the ride caused any alarm. That was the point. That's what he paid for.

Seven. Has anyone criticised your betting, whether or not you thought it was true? "Whether or not you thought it was true." Magnificent. This lets your mother-in-law contribute directly to the official statistics. Mine can detect a gambling problem in a man buying a raffle ticket for the village hall roof. Give her the clipboard and she'll have half the county in residential treatment by lunch and the vicar sectioned by tea.

Eight. Has gambling caused financial problems? Reasonable, if it means a missed mortgage. Less so if someone merely regrets a losing accumulator while spending £6.80 a day on oat-milk flat whites without anyone calling for a public inquiry.

Nine. Have you felt guilty about gambling? This is Britain. We apologise to furniture after walking into it. Guilt can signal harm. It can also signal that you were raised by a Methodist grandmother who regarded the tombola as the slip road to Sodom.

Still not convinced? Run the same nine questions on golf. Have you needed more expensive clubs to get the same excitement? Gone back another day to win back the strokes you lost? Has your wife criticised it, whether or not you thought she was right? Do you feel guilty about the £4,000 driver in the garage? Congratulations. You've just diagnosed every member of every club in Surrey, and the Ryder Cup is now a public health emergency.

Now count what's missing. Pounds staked. Net losses. How often. How long. Which product. None of it is there. The nine questions measure how you feel about your gambling, which is a different thing from your gambling. It's a smoke alarm, and smoke alarms are marvellous, but nobody uses one to survey the roof.

The epidemic that hides when you knock

And now the truly entertaining part. The NHS adult mental health survey of England for 2023 to 2024, using the same yardstick, found 0.4 per cent scoring eight or more. The Gambling Commission's 2025 survey of Great Britain found 2.4.

Six times as high.

Before anyone shouts "fraud", the samples and methods differ, and the Commission has published research suggesting people own up to more when answering privately on a screen than when a nice lady with a lanyard is sitting on their sofa. That's a serious explanation. Follow it through. Britain now has the only epidemic in medical history that gets worse when the doctor leaves the room. Ring the doorbell and it's 0.4. Send an email and it's 2.4. Post the questionnaire in a sealed envelope, in Belgium, and presumably we're all done for.

Here's the second idea nobody in Westminster has had. The PGSI doesn't measure how much people gamble. It measures how much they're prepared to confess. A confession rate is a perfectly respectable thing to study. It is not a perfectly respectable thing to tax. So the methodology belongs next to the headline in the same size type, not buried beneath a ministerial speech about saving civilisation.

A horse is not a fruit machine with legs

The zealot's greatest trick, though, is abolishing the differences between products. The Commission's own adjusted research found a significant association between online slots and high PGSI scores. For online betting on sport or racing, the adjusted association was not statistically significant. That doesn't prove racing is harmless, and in-person sports and racing betting gave a different result. What it proves is more awkward: different products, customers and patterns need separate examination. It is like a transport minister giving an aircraft carrier and an electric scooter the same speed limit because both have motors. Which, now I've written it down, sounds exactly like something the Department for Transport would put out to consultation. And look who pays. The harm data points hardest at slots, yet the man studying the 3.15 at Haydock is the one asked to send in his bank statements. It's like catching a burglar and fining the neighbour, because the neighbour was easier to find.

And anyone who wants to regulate betting should first learn the arithmetic. Turnover is not loss. A £10 winning bet at evens returns £20, including the stake; the bookmaker has not made £20. Someone staking £10,000 across a season might finish £300 down or £2,000 up. Confusing stakes with losses is like declaring Tesco's entire takings to be profit because you once saw a till receipt, then demanding a windfall tax on the receipt.

The bookies don't get off either

None of this lets bookmakers off. Online operators can see what every account deposits, stakes, wins and loses, and when. A business that can spot a shrewd punter winning too often, and cut him to 37p a bet before his tea's gone cold, can certainly spot someone depositing in a frenzy at three in the morning. If protecting people is the objective, use that data under proper governance, test interventions, separate the products and publish what works. And help, properly, the people whose lives are being wrecked. That part isn't funny, and I'm not going to pretend it is.

But stop letting the loudest voice in the room pretend that hating gambling is the same as understanding it. Some campaigners know the evidence inside out. Others appear to have learned everything from one photograph of a fruit machine and a particularly alarming adjective.

Gambling can destroy lives. It can also be harmless fun, a test of skilled judgement or, in my case, an expensive way to discover that a horse called Certain Winner is neither. A sensible country would regulate those things differently. Instead, we've handed a nine-question clipboard to my mother-in-law.

She's found 1.3 million of us. She's still going.