Gambling Advertising

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, our minds are filled with the terrible things which are happening in Ukraine, so much so that it would be easy to push other essential issues out of focus, but we must not allow ourselves to do that. I am therefore grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for giving us this opportunity to look again at the question of gambling, and especially the way it affects our children. Despite repeated attempts to stir, prod, dynamite those with power into taking action, we seem to have to go on making the same case again and again.

I am sure many of us share the same feeling of horror when told that there are 450,000 gamblers aged 11 to 16, of whom more than 60,000 are deemed addicts—figures cited by those who have preceded me in this debate. This is not the inadvertent repetition of an old man losing his marbles; it is a statement that needs repeating as many times as it takes to sink into the heads of those with power to act.

As a nation, we are now opening clinics offering advice and support to children and young people suffering from an addiction to gambling. This is, as has been said, a health crisis. We must find the will and fashion the tools to flatten the curve, and a ban on gambling advertising during sports matches is, as has been said, as good a place as any to begin and is long overdue. There is no reason for this not to happen—except, I suppose, for the shedloads of money that the gambling industry pours into the Exchequer every year.

If we know that children and at-risk gamblers are likely to watch sports games, why knowingly put them in harm’s way? An endorsement of gambling by someone’s favourite football team or player must surely influence the opinion of young fans. Legal it may be, at least for the moment; harmful it certainly is. As such, it fits easily among the legal but harmful issues currently being set forth in the online safety Bill.

This is indeed a health crisis: an epidemic. So, I ask the Minister a simple question. If we have the vaccine, the capability drastically to reduce the number of child problem gamblers and the experts begging us to do it, will the Government be part of the mission—or will they content themselves with being anti-vaxxers?

Freedom of Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, for a Methodist Minister to be standing second to the Archbishop of Canterbury is the nearest that he will get to preferment. I hope that it will guarantee some quick access to heavenly places in due course. We are all grateful to the most reverend Primate for securing this debate and for delivering his speech with such courage. We wish him well in getting over his ailment. This is a subject of great concern, and I did not know whether to begin my remarks by thinking of the times—the years—that I spent at Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner; freedom of speech is pretty much written into the raison d’être of that particular experience.

However, I start somewhere else. I am a member of the Communications and Digital Select Committee and I am happy to note that other members of the committee are here to speak on this important matter later in the debate. Our report was published in July, and many of the points in it have been raised by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop in his remarks a moment ago. Of course, all of us on the committee are looking forward very much to the day that the House gets round eventually—I repeat “eventually” for the ears of the Minister—to debating the report.

One of the people we interviewed in the course of our deliberations was Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian newspaper and currently a member of the oversight board of Facebook, which we must now call Meta. I remember his rigorous defence of free speech. He insisted that offensive speech should not be regulated or banished simply because it is offensive. Bad speech should be met with better speech, offensive views should be countered with determined and constructive argument. He was clear that where offensive matter is intended to stir up hatred and even violence, it should be dealt with under the provisions of the Equality Act. Such matters are not part of the case that I wish to make now. As far as is humanly possible, civil society, public and private sectors together should envisage maintaining the possibility of open discussion, even when offensive views are uttered.

Faith communities have not, over the years, proved to be exemplary in these matters—the most reverend Primate hinted at this in his own speech. From the very beginning of Christianity, “heresy” was the word used to describe those to whom freedom of speech was to be denied: those who held divergent views from the “orthodox” mainstream. They were often persecuted or exiled—or worse. The examples of the history of the formulation of the Nicene Creed, the split between Western and eastern Christianity, the Protestant Reformation and, even at a humble level, the ejection of Methodists from the Church of England for the ignoble sin of being enthusiastic all offer ample illustration of the way that Christians have fought bitter battles which have ended in fragmentation and division. The notions of excommunication, heresy and blasphemy—polar opposites of free speech—are only too evident in the history of the Christian Church. It seems indeed to be part of our DNA: just read any account of the making of the Nicene Creed, or Aldous Huxley’s Grey Eminence, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov or even Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley to get the picture of these goings-on in the first five centuries of the Christian Church, or the 17th-century, or 19th-century Russia or even 20th-century Wales.

The Motion that we are discussing asks us to be “contemporary” in our consideration of these matters, so let me move from the past to the present and from the general to the particular. I am a Christian and, consequently, my values are focused on and flow from the person of Jesus Christ. I admire his teaching, I am ready to commend his example to all and sundry and I will proudly advocate his cause in debate with anyone, anywhere, at any time. Here is someone who has been subject to continuous and intense scrutiny down the centuries, much of it negative. So how should I take some of the treatments of this man, to whom I owe such complete allegiance? He has variously been described as an adulterer, a homosexual, a social revolutionary, a fanatic, other-worldly, a fool, a clown and much else. I could easily point to the films, poems, novels, diatribes, statues, paintings and dogmas that are inspired by these critiques.

Far from feeling threatened or offended by these often dismissive views, I must say that it somehow pleases me his persona is considered important enough to go on being given attention down the centuries. Indeed, I feel stimulated by such categorisation, caricature and critiques to put forward an alternative viewpoint. I know that the strongest recommendation for anything one believes in can come only from the way that one lives one’s life. But there is a proper place for argument, discussion and debate, and I want this to be as lively, real and honest as possible, however cantankerous it may sometimes be.

From these remarks and in the short time available in this debate, let me assure noble Lords that I would happily put on a series of lectures somewhere on the premises at any time for those who would like a fuller treatment of each of these schematic points. A Welshman who has been to university both has something in his head and, especially, the gift of being able to put it into words—so there you go; that is an offer.

In conclusion, I hope that noble Lords will feel that I have addressed the Motion before us directly and honestly—and personally. If this approach to offensive discourse is valid in the realm of faith, I suggest that it may be equally applicable in other areas of our lives too.

BBC: Government Support

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is indeed a pleasure to be part of this debate, brought forward by my noble friend Lord Bragg. I have had the honour, twice on television and once on radio, to be part of programmes that he has put out, and it was a learning experience in its own right. It is almost as much a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who has made my task infinitely more difficult by his mention of me, gracious as it was, a moment ago. It was also a pleasure to hear the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool—I must call him my noble friend or noble colleague—as he gave us an indication of what we should expect from him in the future.

The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and I are both members of the Select Committee on Communications and Digital. Just last week the committee interrogated a Government Minister on the subject of online safety. I asked the Minister how the fine principles he was adumbrating might command respect and solidarity in the international community. We were, after all, discussing the worldwide web. The Minister informed us that he had recently attended conferences in various countries beyond our shores. He wanted to impress upon the committee the respect and trust in which we were held by countries abroad. They trust us, he said, and they know that we will keep our word and that we have integrity; they revere our culture. I am sure that we all wish that were true. Indeed, I venture to suggest, as others have in this debate, that if it is true, it owes more to the BBC than to Her Majesty’s Government—especially, perhaps, the present one.

I will limit my brief moment on the stage to the BBC’s radio output. For over 30 years, in a cameo career, I have worked on Radio 4, Radio 2, Radio Wales, the World Service and regional stations of the BBC. For a number of years, in faraway Haiti, run as it was by a dictator, our understanding of what was happening—really happening—in the world at large was provided by the BBC. I know that is as true now as it was then. Indeed, the BBC dominates the radio waves, with a 51% share of total audiences.

In countries where there is political turbulence, threats to the lives of public figures, one natural disaster after another and, nowadays, the onward and outward march of the pandemic, it is likely that the only proper perspective on a maelstrom of events will come to beleaguered and confused people—even with the competing demand for public attention by television and social media—through the informed work of our beloved BBC radio. I know that, in distant and remote places, in underdeveloped and developing countries, radio is available where television is not. Ask not, then, in these troubled post-Brexit times, who can best help to forge the frequently expressed desire for a nation that bestrides the ocean like a colossus. In pole position, we just have to recognise the BBC: Auntie, global Britain hath need of thee.

Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill [HL]

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, we are deeply indebted to the noble Baroness for bringing this matter before us in this Bill, and doubly in her debt for the extraordinary speech with which she introduced our proceedings. Indeed, on the strength of that alone, I think we could test the mind of the House, and I think I know what the result would be. Once I sit down, I will be praying hard that the Minister will find within him a way of answering her challenges that will satisfy the mind of the House, and I would not be in his place for all the money in the world.

My interest is as chair of the board of the Central Foundation Schools of London, where our children are aged 11 and over, but faced with the most horrendous range of familiarity with material that is without any doubt harmful and leads to outcomes that are to do with not only sexualisation but violence on the streets. It is a problem of gargantuan proportions. The British Board of Film Classification found that more than half of 11 to 13 year-olds had been exposed to pornography.

What are the by-products of this? We know just what it can lead to, and the noble Baroness has pointed to some of those possible outcomes. She has such a wealth of experience and has given the Government the perfect guide for effective regulation. I see no reason why we should reject any element of the Bill. Indeed, the Secretary of State for DCMS told the Joint Committee on the draft online safety Bill that the Government wanted their digital legislation to be “watertight”. The antithesis of this is an online safety Bill that is void of any semblance of age assurance. I have no doubt that the committee's findings on this matter will bring this to the fore. “Watertight” must include adequate provision for age assurance.

Objectors to age assurance ring a tired bell. The issue of privacy is their central concern. This is not to diminish the value of online privacy and data protection. In my role on the Select Committee on Communications and Digital—I am delighted that others from the committee will be speaking later in this debate—I see the clear and present dangers of giving online companies our data freely and without constraints. The minimum standards within Clause 2 should have assuaged any fears anyone could have about unnecessary data gathering under the guise of age assurance. The clause offers appropriate parameters which would protect our privacy.

Some of our online industries intended for adult consumption seem to be aware of the need to regulate in line with the recommendations in the ICO’s age-appropriate design code. The legally recognised gambling industry continues to do a reasonably good job on age assurance and preventing those who are underage from accessing it. But there are problems, and these go unchecked because of the lack of a government line.

We simply cannot trust the internet and the huge companies that dominate it to regulate themselves. There is a toxic culture of acceptance that, to have a certain level of privacy and freedom online, we must sacrifice our children’s innocence and subject them to harmful media. I hope all noble Lords will join together in understanding that, in the light of the proposals in the Bill, a way can be found to avoid such an outcome. It is, perhaps, icing on the cake that, if we take the Bill’s proposals forward, it will help us to achieve a legislative framework that will show other nations the way to protect children, at a time when the internet is gaining an ever-tightening hold on the societies we live in.

Gosh, I wish we could vote now: I would have my coffee after saying “Content”. I will leave those ideas for the consideration of the House.

Gambling Commission: Data

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, through the pandemic the use of data in the National Health Service has made it obvious to all of us what a good database can help us achieve. Surely a database of a similar order in respect of the gambling industry would similarly help us make good progress towards addressing these problems that are frequently, and over many years, mentioned in this House. The single customer view methodology takes people’s data—with the permission of the Information Commissioner, as regards GDPR—and pools it to provide precisely the database that I think we would all welcome. Will the Minister assure us that this is a way forward and that he is committed with his officials to finding a solution?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right that good data drives good policy, and that is what we want to see in the review. The Gambling Commission is working with operators on how they can share data where they believe a customer is at risk, and the Information Commissioner has confirmed that data protection law can permit this in relation to the work on single customer view, as the noble Lord mentioned. We encourage the industry to trial a solution swiftly.

Covid-19: Museums, Galleries and Historic Buildings

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope I am being heard. Many practical proposals have been made and many urgent needs expressed. I want to raise a more general point. We have been concentrating, quite properly, on health—physical, mental and social—over these last weeks. We are in the middle of a heated discussion about the place of schools in the way we recover from this lockdown and its attendant circumstances. I want the Minister to assure me that she will go into the Cabinet room with her colleagues and fly a flag to ensure that the cultural, social and sporting aspects of human life will be seen as integral, alongside economic and other factors, in the recovery that we all long for. We cannot allow this to be deprioritised, marginalised and minimised. This is part of the health of the nation, and we want a Minister to champion the cause.

Covid-19: Public Interest Reporting

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2020 Lords Chamber

Tabled by

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that, in the event of any further restrictions on movement to limit the transmission of COVID-19, journalists and photographers carrying press cards will continue to have the freedom to travel for the purposes of public interest reporting.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, and with his permission, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.

Sport England: Female Activity

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran]

As my noble friend said, This Girl Can plays an important part in inspiring women aged 16 to 60 to be active, and almost 122,000 more women are active today compared with 2015-16. However, we do not want to dictate to women how they should be active. Rather, we want them to have access to the right opportunities locally and the right environment. Sport England is investing over £240 million in the national governing bodies of sport to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to participate in the sport that is right for them. We also know that it is very important for girls to be active from an early age, so there is £320 million from the sports premium to encourage this in primary schools.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, the Question before us is not only ground-breaking but—let me confess it—in my case, mind-breaking, for I knew little about this campaign, and wish that I had. I congratulate all those who are making these things work, as well as the recent advertising campaign that is prepared to honestly and openly show women and girls who are not, shall we say, built like gold medal winners at the Olympic Games. People of all shapes and sizes are in the publicity doing the exercise that they need to, and that is brilliant. Also, those tender and difficult aspects of a woman’s life—

[A noble Baroness]

Oh no!

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

It is in the publicity, I am only quoting—it is the menopause and the menstrual cycle, but they are honestly portrayed in the advertising too. I wonder, therefore, in view of the fact that I have known so little about it, whether the Government could put some effort into persuading those who run this campaign to take more of us into the secret of what is happening, and make the publicity a bit more widespread.

[Baroness Barran]

I am delighted that the noble Lord finds the campaign compelling and has learned from it; I think that will be true for many of us. The Government have supported the campaign substantially through Sport England, and in addition to the increase in the number of women engaged in sport, 16,000 organisations have registered as supporters and over three-quarters of a million women are active members of the online community.

Gambling Act 2005 (Variation of Monetary Limits) Order 2020

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2020 Grand Committee

I end by saying that I hope that the Government will consider and improve transparency measures, reintroduce an expenses cap, review the system of taxing the National Lottery and ensure that there are no further changes that disproportionately benefit, as these do, the umbrella-style lotteries.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I have no difficulty in agreeing entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Foster, has said about some of the questions that do, and must, remain under review. Certainly, the hardest thing of all is the balance between the interests of the National Lottery and the society lotteries, and this statutory instrument seeks to establish such a balance. It is clear from the supporting documentation and the National Lottery’s responses to these proposals that the National Lottery does not feel terrifically positive about that as far as its own interests are concerned.

The present limits on prize money and amounts to be raised were set 15 and 12 years ago, and therefore for me—and, I think, for my party—at this stage it seems reasonable and proportionate to contemplate an increase from £4 million to £5 million, with the same percentages for the top prize money. I do not think that anyone on our side wants to oppose this SI, but we urge that close attention be given to how it all works out.

This is a more satisfactory statutory instrument than some of the ones that I have stood here to ask about. There has been a consultation and an attempt to work out some of the likely impacts of the proposals. The proposals in this statutory instrument seem okay, but we should take with a pinch of salt the suggestion that we might go rather quickly towards much higher totals. We would need robust evidence that the pace of increase was proportionate and appropriate—so that hint ought to be squashed straightaway. As and when it is time to look at further increases, let us do so, but let us not give that hostage to fortune within the proposals before us now.

The umbrella lotteries have been amply referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Foster: I understand that the Minister will clarify that and I shall see whether my thinking on this is right. But one of the objects of moving the figures upward is to make these umbrella lotteries less necessary, and therefore to avoid duplicating administrative costs because of the multiplicity of bodies that come together to form the umbrella. I do not know whether metaphorically you can bring bodies together to form an umbrella, but noble Lords will know what I mean. It would be very good to have a word of clarification on that. Will there be a material reduction in administrative costs? That would go some way towards meeting the point raised, properly, by the noble Lord, Lord Foster.

The extra transparency that the Gambling Commission and committees of the House are looking at has been hinted at. We certainly need to have some answers to the questions that have been raised, and I hope that we will. It is important to note that there has been cross-party approval and support for these proposals, including from the Liberal Democrats—or, at least, named Members in the paperwork that I have received.

Finally—there is no need to say more than needs to be said—a proper process has taken place and a proportionate set of suggestions about increasing the amounts seems to be contained within these papers. I would be very careful about giving a hostage to fortune regarding further increases at the moment, although perhaps later that could be brought to our attention as a separate matter. I would like to know how these umbrella bodies will be affected by the increases in administrative costs that we are talking about. With all that said, we do not want to stand in the way of this SI being approved.

BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a truly remarkable debate. It would do us all well to read it in Hansard when it appears. I suppose that I should express some kind of a conflict of interest since, like the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury, I have had a working relationship with the BBC for more than 30 years and have been paid much less than he ever was. I still do my little bits now and again. I have read all the briefing material that has come my way. As often happens, the noble Lord, Lord Foster, has stolen a bit of my thunder, but it is the rolling kind of thunder and so there is a bit of it left.

Some of the original research I did was in the Radio Times. I thought that it was not a bad idea to look in it to see what is on today. All I have done is choose half a dozen things. There is women’s football, for example; women’s sport has been mentioned. There is “Villages by the Sea” on Clovelly; this programme was done regionally at first but it is showing across the network now. There is “MasterChef”; on my honeymoon, I took a book with a perfectly produced picture of the meal I was going to cook for my beloved, but it did not look like that when it got on the plate, and “MasterChef” does that for me too. Across the PSBs, we have “EastEnders”, “Emmerdale” and “Hollyoaks”. Informing, educating and entertaining is exactly what is being done. By the recommendation of the Minister herself, this evening we have “Noughts + Crosses”. We all ought to watch that to show the capacity of the BBC to look imaginatively at British society from a curiously upended point of view, following the novels of Malorie Blackman. I shall be watching because of the Minister. I want to say a nice word about her because where have all the Tories gone? Where are they? They are shy violets, every one. How will they ever learn?

In this debate, we have heard authoritative voices. We have the experience of my noble friends Lord Puttnam, Lord Bragg and Lady Bakewell, the hands-on experience of the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, the vast experience of an entirely different kind of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, who I shall now think of as a ruminant and who has an insightful take on all these things, and the hands-on experience of the noble Lord, Lord Birt. That is just picking some names. Of course, I cannot do that for everybody, but this is an authoritative body of people sharing their views about a matter of great concern to all of us, and we hope that we are articulating a voice out there in the country, which would be glad to think that people such as the noble Lords I have mentioned are bringing their voices to a debate of this kind. It matters to us but it matters much more to them, and that is what we are here for.

I would also mention a Conservative who spoke in a previous debate on this subject and who is not in his place: the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, a leading journalist who wrote a much-quoted article after the general election in which much criticism was offered of the BBC’s coverage. Of course there are things that go wrong and could be better. Who can think of an organisation the size of the BBC that does not sometimes put its foot in it in a big way? To answer the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, there must be change. If we do not embrace change and anticipate and study where developments have to be made, the BBC will increasingly become part of our archive rather than an ongoing, vibrant part of the national culture.

Much has been said about the licence fee and continuing funding. The licence has been called the least worst solution, and many people have advocated it. It is worth picking up a comment from across the Chamber that it is worth looking at a progressive household tax as a possible alternative. We will certainly need to raise money; the noble Lord, Lord Foster, quoted the Voice of the Listener & Viewer statistics that there has already been a 30% erosion of the funding base in the past 10 years. We will have to look for a model of funding if we believe in the BBC and believe that it should be publicly funded. Everybody seems to think that and I suspect that if we took the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, out to a good lunch, he might think that too—well, I hope so.

We need to look more critically at alternative ways of achieving better funding, but the BBC gets everywhere. I have sat in studios all over the United Kingdom; nobody can tell me that the BBC is dominated by this elite in London. There are fast-moving BBC radio and television stations across the country. Where Welsh coverage would be without public service broadcasting, I do not know. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, is not in his place. I did not know that he speaks Gaelic. It is said that there are probably only about two people who do, but there is something for them. In Wales, the resurgence of the Welsh language can be attributed almost directly to the reach of the BBC and public service broadcasting. As the right reverend Prelate said, the BBC is not just descriptive; it is shaping the public with proactive involvement in a culture that is always on the move.

I have found this debate extremely insightful and I have enjoyed it very much. I will certainly read Hansard, particularly to get my noble friend’s comments about the lean and hungry man in No. 10 who thinks too much; the power behind the throne; the éminence grise. I will not call him Rasputin because I believe that he likes that, but for all that, there is something curious and weird about policy being made about an institution so integral to the British identity as the BBC by someone who has never been elected and who never has to stand and face an audience such as this.

Incidentally, I have a word for the Minister. The Prime Minister did not have the bottle to face Andrew Neil in the course of the election campaign; this kind of displacement on the part of the Conservative Party has put the noble Baroness almost on her own to face a collective body that might be rather like Andrew Neil. How she is going to deal with it, I simply do not know, but we look forward to her remarks. The debate will convey to the Government of our day the importance of this institution and the necessity of us contributing to it our support and confidence as we look forward to its ongoing influence in the years ahead.