Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Foster of Bath and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Monday 16th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

First, I would make a distinction between children and adults. Secondly, as somebody who is from a large, football-obsessed family, I am more than a little aware of all the encouragement that football fans have to put on a bet. But not all of them do when they are encouraged and, what is more, even if they do, they do not necessarily become problem gamblers, which is what is being posited. It can be something that they enjoy.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

This is not a case of me positing anything—I hope the noble Baroness accepts that. The figures I quoted are from the Gambling Commission and the Government.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I have some figures, but I wanted to put forward a counter to these amendments without going into the details. I have spoken on this on many occasions in this House and I have written about it. I have figures, and we can swap our statistics. But I wanted to argue that it is proposed that allowing advertising of any sort around football, and allowing gambling to be associated with it, normalises gambling—but that is a slightly odd argument because gambling is a normal activity. The vast majority of people who put a bet on do so without a problem: it is part of their private leisure pursuits, which they enjoy. It is completely within the realms of spending money that they probably should not spend—it is Christmas and I have done a lot of that over the last few days when shopping. One makes choices and spends money that one probably should not spend, but it does not have to be turned into some kind of problem. It is our choice, and there should be some perspective about the threat.

The Gambling Commission does not give credence to the idea that gambling problems are completely out of control. Despite a lot of noise and rhetoric, there is no evidence that there has been an overwhelming increase in problem gambling since advertising was made legal by none other than Tony Blair’s Government in 2007.