More and more people today have debts that they have to pay off so that they cannot easily get through the month. In Rotterdam, the Rotterdam City Initiative wants to prevent more and more young people from having to live with debts due to the minimum age for a visit to the city casino increase to 21 years. Party leader Jos Verveen of the new Rotterdam party submitted written questions to the city council last week. He asks whether the entry age can be raised by three years at all gambling halls and the Holland Casino in Rotterdam.
Extra loans to fill gaps
The then-mayor Rob van Gijzel in the Brabant city of Eindhoven managed to do it before, only Holland Casino did not participate in the covenant. Nevertheless, Verveen expects that the mayor of Rotterdam Aboutaleb will get this done. Youth coach Youssef el Bahri and number seven on the list of this new political party has come up with the idea of raising the age. El Bahri himself is a youth coach in the Rotterdam district of Crooswijk, where he was born and raised. Therefore explicitly asked for a youth worker for his party and therefore ended up at el Bahri. After being asked what the biggest problems are that he encounters in his work as a youth coach, he answered with ¨debt, mainly debts that young people incur through gambling.For example, he saw a lot of young people build up sky-high debts in a short time that amounted to thousands of euros. In most cases, it started with an innocent gamble, but soon the entire student grant or the income from a side job goes through it. Once debts and problems, the teenagers do not know how to deal with it, consequences are not paying their health insurance and even taking out loans to fill the gaps. In many cases, you also see young people opting for the criminal path to get quick money. If all 41 gambling halls and the Holland Casino in Rotterdam participate in the covenant, these figures will drop considerably, according to Verveen. The party leader, therefore, has every confidence in a good outcome, because he thinks Aboutaleb will get it done.