A surge in financial distress among young people in Enschede has prompted local politician Meryam Sümer to call for raising the minimum legal gambling age from 18 to 24. It’s an unusually aggressive intervention into the regulatory debate around online gaming in the Netherlands.

Municipal data paints a stark picture. One in five young residents in the city is currently in debt, with 2025 figures showing 12,145 problematic debt reports. Among these, 960 cases involved people facing eviction or utility disconnection. What’s striking is the engagement rate from the municipality: roughly 33 percent of cases, which significantly exceeds the national average of around 20 percent.

Credit, gambling, and algorithmic temptation

Sümer, who works as a welfare professional alongside her role in the Christian Democratic Party (CDA), identifies a convergence of factors driving youth indebtedness. Buy-now-pay-later services proliferate. Mobile gaming monetisation strategies are everywhere. And readily accessible online gambling sits right there alongside them, creating what she describes as a perfect storm of financial temptation.

“Many youngsters do not yet have the financial awareness to manage multiple subscriptions, installment purchases and gambling offers appearing on social media and within mobile games,” she stated. Frankly, how these pressures combine to create serious community problems is hard to ignore.

Her call for tighter advertising restrictions has some empirical backing too. Despite existing Dutch gambling advertising controls since 2013, which ban promotional content in public spaces and prohibit marketing to under-24s, recent research found that 11.2 percent of Meta platform advertisements still targeted the 18-23 age bracket.

A contentious regulatory proposal

Raising the gambling age to 24 would be unprecedented across Europe, where 18 remains the standard threshold. It echoes similar attempts to tighten regulation. Back in February 2024, State Secretary Teun Struycken suggested increasing the online slots age limit to 21, which prompted immediate pushback from the Dutch gambling regulator (KSA).

The regulator’s chairman made a simple argument: age restrictions would push younger players toward black market operators, who operate without safeguarding requirements. “For young people under 21, the illegal supply will still be accessible with a few mouse clicks,” he wrote. The enforcement challenge is real.

That concern triggered a parliamentary debate. Struycken proposed a phased implementation to mitigate black market migration. Christian Union leader Bikker, meanwhile, suggested a blanket age-21 limit across all gambling verticals rather than targeting individual products.

Sümer acknowledges that an outright ban would be preferable but politically unfeasible in the short term. Her strategy focuses instead on reducing exposure through stricter regulation. She is now urging municipal representatives and political parties to pressure national lawmakers for reform.

What the team thinks

Carl Mitchell says:

Philippa’s piece captures a real concern, but I’d argue the data doesn’t necessarily point to gambling as the root cause rather than a symptom of deeper economic pressures hitting young Dutch residents, and raising the age to 24 risks treating a complex debt crisis with a blunt instrument when better operator compliance and player protection tools might address the actual problem. What struck me from covering the UK market for over a decade is that responsible operators already invest heavily in affordability checks and safer gambling features, so the conversation should really be about enforcement and whether existing 18+ regulations are being properly implemented rather than whether the age itself is wrong. The real question Meryam should be asking is whether Enschede’s licensed operators are doing due diligence on their customers’ financial situations, because that’s where meaningful intervention actually happens.