King’s Speech

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle and the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, on their maiden speeches. For all of us in this House, our maiden speech is an ordeal—even, I guess, for a Bishop—but I think we will all agree that the maiden speeches we have heard this afternoon rose to the occasion. Both the right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness have their own perspective through which they can contribute to our future debates in this House, and we very much look forward to their contributions.

I want to direct my brief remarks to reform of gambling law. Gambling is not mentioned in the King’s Speech and that is not surprising because, although there is much to do in the next 12 months, the measures the Government are going to take do not require legislation. I welcome many of the measures in the Government’s recent White Paper and I declare my interest as a member of the executive committee of Peers for Gambling Reform. In this context, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, its indefatigable chairman, who can take a lot of the credit for the fact that the Government’s proposals in the White Paper are a great deal better than at one time they looked like being.

The noble Lord will be speaking later in the debate about the Government’s proposals more generally, but I want to concentrate my remarks on gambling reform as it affects young people. Gambling, like alcohol, is an activity which gives innocent pleasure to the vast majority of its users. But like alcohol, gambling, when it becomes an addiction, causes immeasurable human misery and even death. All the more reason, therefore, why we should protect young people from developing such an addiction. A 2019 study by the Gambling Commission suggested that there were more than 350,000 child gamblers in the UK and that approximately 55,000 children between the ages of 11 and 16 were at risk of becoming problem gamblers. Those are alarming statistics.

I want to address two areas of risk for young people. One is loot boxes and the other is “celebrity” or “influencer” streaming of gambling content. I do not know how many Members of this House are familiar with loot boxes, but they are games, particularly popular with the young, whereby players can acquire assets, sometimes by paying and sometimes in other ways, to improve their chances of winning. Loot boxes do not fall within the technical definition of gambling because players cannot cash their winnings, but they obviously play to the human instinct to take a risk to get a reward, and they can be highly addictive.

The Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto stated that the Gambling Act 2005 would be reviewed, with

“a particular focus on tackling issues around loot boxes”.

It therefore seems that at that time the Government had reason to believe that there was a link between loot boxes and gambling, and that action needed to be taken to prevent the harm which would arise from it.

One of the options open to the Government was to extend the Gambling Act to cover loot boxes, but they decided not to take that course. Instead, after consultation with the gambling industry, they decided to rely on the industry itself to provide protections: but this industry has an obvious conflict of interest. A report in 2021 by the charity GambleAware found that around 5% of loot-box purchases could generate half the industry’s loot-box revenues, with almost a third of these falling into the “problem gambler” category. The danger is that so many of those problem gamblers will be children. The Government have said that they will keep their position under review and will not hesitate to consider legislative options if the measures taken by the industry do not prove satisfactory. Will the Government make that undertaking concrete, and commit to making a report by a specific date?

My second issue is the online streaming of gambling content. Because of the backing of celebrities or influencers, children can indirectly involve themselves in gambling before they are of the legal age to gamble. The noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Owen, mentioned the dangers that come from new technology, and this is a form of that danger. Figures for as recently as August show that a website called kick.com—I have not used it myself, but it is known for streamed gambling content—was visited over 80,000 times, much of that by children. Are the Government conscious of this risk, among the other dangers of technology and online content, and will they consider using their powers under the Online Safety Act to restrict the exposure of young people to it?