The Prime Minister should ‘step in’ to prevent children being overwhelmed by TV adverts that ‘normalise and glamorise’ gambling, a columnist has said. Writing in The Times, Rachel Sylvester criticised the coverage of this year’s World Cup, saying that children ‘could not avoid being bombarded by a campaign to encourage them to take a punt on the outcome of every match’. She highlighted Ofcom findings, which show that four to fifteen-year-olds are exposed to an average of 211 gambling adverts a year each. She noted a 600 per cent increase in TV gambling adverts since Labour liberalised the law in 2007, allowing sports betting, online casinos and poker to be promoted on television. The Labour sports minister who introduced the liberalisation, Gerry Sutcliffe, has admitted his government got it wrong. We did not envisage so much advertising for sports betting before the 9pm watershed’.