Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill
Debate between Lord Browne of Belmont and Lord Phillips of Sudbury
Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)
My Lords, the Government have been very clear that this Bill is about consumer protection. As others have noted, this was made very clear by the Minister, Helen Grant MP, in another place when she said that the new licensing proposals address,
“the fundamental purpose of the Bill, which is to enhance consumer protection by ensuring that all operators offering remote gambling in Britain are regulated by the Gambling Commission, whether they are based in Britain or overseas”.—[Official Report, Commons, Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill Committee, 19/11/13; col. 75.]
As has also been pointed out, though, that statement makes sense only if the new requirement for all online gambling providers based beyond the UK to obtain a UK gambling commission licence is backed by a parallel provision preventing those that do not have a licence from accessing the UK market.
In that context, the main effect of the Bill, far from enhancing consumer protection, is actually to place it under greater pressure by dramatically widening the scope for online gambling advertising in the UK. Rather than enhancing consumer protection, the Bill’s principal implication will consequently be to make the British people more aware of gambling opportunities, and not just any such opportunities but opportunities associated with a far higher problem gambling prevalence figure than gambling generally. While the basic 2010 problem prevalence figure was 0.9% for online, it was over 9% on an annual basis and over 17% on a monthly basis.
Mindful of that, I find the intervention of the Secretary of State over the weekend rather odd. She has said that she wants to clamp down on gambling advertising, yet her department is at the same time introducing dramatic online gambling licensing liberalisation. I am genuinely at a loss to know how these two commitments fit together. Estimates differ, but it is widely recognised that the UK embraces about 450,000 problem gamblers. That may not seem very many as a proportion of the total population, but it is a very significant number of people in absolute terms. We rightly devote very considerable care and attention to other social challenges that affect similar numbers of people, yet we do not seem to accord problem gambling the same level of concern or attention.
Problem gambling is a very debilitating condition that takes over people’s lives and destroys them. Last week, I was privileged to hold a briefing on this amendment in the Palace of Westminster that was addressed by two recovering problem gamblers who bravely shared their stories. Justyn, aged 45, and Dino, aged 36, developed gambling problems relatively recently, within the past four years or so. Of particular interest for the purposes of the Bill, which liberalises online gambling advertising, is that they both began online gambling in response to adverts they had seen promoting free bets. In one case, the advertising was at a sporting event; in the other, it was on a bus. The destructive impact of problem gambling on both was remarkably similar. They got into difficulty relatively quickly and ended up losing their jobs and families and became hugely involved in debt.
They both said that one of the problems with online gambling is the fact that it is available 24/7 with no natural barriers, such as those pertaining to a betting shop. You do not have to leave the house to gamble, and there is no closing time. They also highlighted that it is an enormously solitary experience without any kind of accountability to fellow humans. One of them even ended up selling his son’s christening presents to raise funds to feed his habit. It is a matter of great concern to me that this Bill, which is supposed to be about consumer protection, not only proposes making life much more difficult for problem gamblers, such as Justin and Dino, but completely fails to take any balancing or compensating steps to help them.
In this regard, the failure to do so is further compounded by the fact that online gamblers are already seriously disadvantaged in terms of the support available to them when compared with terrestrial gamblers. One of the key mechanisms for helping problem gamblers is self-exclusion. Problem gamblers, like other addicts, experience days when they are stronger and days when they are weaker. On a stronger day, a problem gambler can get around the five betting shops in his town and self-exclude for a fixed period—say, six months—and thereby cut himself off from local gambling opportunities for the period in question, during which time he can seek help and try to put his life back together again. Crucially, however, the same provision does not have the same effect for online problem gamblers. On a strong day, the online problem gambler can self-exclude from five online gambling providers, but he cannot cut himself off from all locally available online gambling opportunities because there will still be hundreds, if not thousands, of online gambling providers that remain equally accessible from his bedroom.
Not only do online problem gamblers have to exclude themselves far more times to cut themselves off from locally available gambling opportunities, they would have to self-exclude to an extent that is physically impossible. Mindful of the fact that self-excluding once is a difficult step for a problem gambler to take, the idea of doing it hundreds, if not thousands of times, simply is not credible.
Given this problem, it is my firm belief that we should provide online problem gamblers with the credible form of self-exclusion promoted by my amendment. Amendment 7 proposes that instead of trying to self-exclude from multiple online gambling websites, online problem gamblers should have the option of self-excluding just once to the Gambling Commission. The Gambling Commission would then relay the self-exclusion to all online providers with Gambling Commission licences and all such providers would be required to honour the terms of the self-exclusion as a condition of their licence.
The need for a one-stop shop online self-exclusion mechanism was demonstrated clearly through the testimony of the online problem gamblers who came to Parliament last week. Justyn Larcombe said that had a one-stop shop self-exclusion mechanism been in place in 2012 it could have saved his marriage. Justyn, with the support of his wife, made the difficult decision to self-exclude from the online gambling site he had been using. The reality of his self-exclusion provided both Justyn and his wife with a real sense of security. It was, however, only a matter of time before he saw adverts for other online gambling websites and, three months on, he had been fully set back into using alternative sites. When his long-suffering wife found out, that was it; she left him.
Dino Panayi, meanwhile, explained how he had managed to self-exclude from 25 websites but, in words that all too eloquently sum up the problem, he said:
“The problem is, there is always another website”.
Again, he was adamant that a one-stop shop self-exclusion mechanism would make a real and practical difference to their lives. Of course, neither was suggesting that the one-stop shop was a magic wand that would liberate them from their problem, but they were both very clear that it was one relatively simple step that could be taken and would make a clear, positive impact on their lives. They could not understand why the Government had not already intervened to introduce a one-stop shop, and were shocked that the Government had whipped against an amendment proposing this change in the Commons.
I find it extraordinary that the Government should introduce what is, in effect, our first Bill specially on online gambling without seizing the opportunity it presents for dealing with the long-term disadvantaging of online problem gamblers. I find it even more extraordinary that the Government should instead use the Bill to make life much more difficult than is already the case for online problem gamblers in the United Kingdom by introducing far-reaching online gambling liberalisation, so that any provider anywhere in the world can now advertise so long as they get a Gambling Commission licence.
Amendment 7 presents your Lordships’ House with the opportunity of ensuring that this, the very first piece of legislation specifically on online gambling, seizes the opportunity to address the historic disadvantage of online problem gamblers. Amendment 7 also provides a means of balancing the online gambling advertising provision in the Bill, which will make life much more difficult for online gamblers, with a provision that would at least provide some assistance. I beg to move.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I support the amendment. Gambling is an extraordinary business, and it is never more so than when otherwise sensible, able people become addicted to it. I was present at the meeting kindly organised by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and I was very moved by the testimony of the two men there who had fallen prey to this addiction. One was a Regular Army officer who was thereafter a senior figure and shareholder in a City business; the other was an engineer who had been a broadcast disc jockey. Listening to those two men—who were being extraordinarily brave, forthright and frank—drove home to me the sheer loneliness and social isolation that goes with the addiction to gambling and what an awful business it is.
I then read Section 1 of the Gambling Act 2005, which is substantially amended by the Bill. This section —in Part 1 of the Act, which is headed “Interpretation of Key Concepts”—under “Principal concepts”, says:
“In this Act a reference to the licensing objectives is a reference to the objectives of”—
the third of which is:
“protecting children and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited by gambling”.
The people we are talking about in this amendment are “other vulnerable persons”, and they are harmed and exploited by gambling and exploited by the companies that run these betting opportunities. They are ruthless in the way that they advertise. They go straight for the jugular. They care not what happens as long as their betting odds come piling in.