Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill

Lord Morrow Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Grand Committee

When such an unusual and broad cross-section of support for a change emerges, perhaps it ought to be taken much more seriously. I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, I am pleased to support Amendments 5, 6 and 7, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. She has explained very clearly why it is simply not credible for the Government to present us with half a Bill—a Bill that, as she rightly says, is all carrot and very little stick, if indeed any stick at all.

If this Bill does not provide a credible enforcement mechanism to protect British consumers from unlicensed providers, its integrity will be in doubt. Neither cracking down on illegal advertising nor player education will prevent unlicensed operators from accessing the UK market. Moreover, the notion that prosecution will do so is simply not credible, for the reasons eloquently set out by DCMS in its remote gambling consultation. The provision of an enforcement mechanism is thus imperative.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, I would like to see the integrity of this Bill restored and, as she said, have it returned to being a complete Bill, with both carrot and stick. To this end, I would very much like to see the Bill amended to make provision for both financial transaction and website blocking. Given that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has concentrated on financial transaction blocking, I will focus my comments on the blocking of websites.

The first point is that we already use ISP blocking to protect intellectual property. The Prime Minister’s newly appointed intellectual property adviser in the other place, Mike Weatherley, the MP for Hove, has threatened fresh legislation against broadband ISPs that,

“knowingly facilitate illegal downloading practices”

and do not take steps to stop it. If there is such an appetite in parts of government to get ISPs to help protect intellectual property, why not use the same tool to protect UK customers from accessing unregulated gambling websites?

My second point is about the nature of ISP blocking within the context of gambling in the United Kingdom. ISP blocking of unlicensed gambling websites will be much more successful than ISP blocking to prevent copyright infringement. Only last October the trade body, BPI, brought a successful case at the High Court, which issued injunctions to ISPs in the UK to block 21 websites that infringe copyright. In 2012 it successfully ensured that ISPs had to block The Pirate Bay, a website also associated with copyright infringement. The Motion Picture Association of America also brought cases against seven websites successfully in the last months of 2013. They are now being blocked by ISPs. In both cases, the websites that are being blocked by ISPs are diverse websites that allow or facilitate copyright infringement. They offer either peer-to-peer file-sharing for music, films or TV, connecting people through the so-called torrents, or direct access to streamed content such as the BBC iPlayer or the ITV and Channel 4 equivalents.

The law that is used to effect the ISP blocks is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, amended by the Digital Economy Act 2010. As I understand it, this is also the basis of the wording of the new clause before us now. In an article published on the BBC News website, a spokesperson for the BPI said that it felt that the blocks currently in force had,

“significantly reduced the use of those sites in the UK”.

The veracity of that claim has of course been challenged but it is safe to say that, for the casual user who is able to access free or nearly free legal content, the block acts as a significant deterrent and points users towards legal content. In the context of gambling websites, however, the evidence suggests that blocking would be even more effective. The remote gambling sector, unlike the copyright piracy sector, requires money to be spent. That increases the incentive for the person who will be spending that money to do so in a responsible way, or at least in a way that will ensure that the money does not go missing if they win a sum and then the irresponsible website does not pay up.

While I take the point that gamblers seek out the best odds that they can find, I also think that there is a desire for them to seek out odds on websites that they know are properly regulated and thus accountable in any dispute over payout and financial security, or indeed disputes about proper player protection. So while it may be possible to get around ISP blocking if one has the requisite know-how, it is unlikely that punters will seek to do this in the same way as illegal file-sharers. Moreover, if ISP blocking were to be combined with a warning page provided by the Gambling Commission that informed users that the website in question was not regulated and operated illegally in the UK, the likelihood of a person then trying to circumvent the ISP block should drop significantly.

The Minister in the other place made the point that ISP blocking for remote gambling websites has seen mixed results in other jurisdictions but it is hard to compare the UK to other jurisdictions because of how open and free the market is in the UK. This means that while there will be websites that operate in the UK without a licence, there will be fewer websites that operate without a licence here than, for example, in Italy. While blocking illegal websites accessing the UK will be very important, therefore, there would be significantly less blocking to do here than in closed markets that use blocking as an enforcement mechanism. Given that the threat of ISP blocking to a potential revenue stream is real, it would act as an incentive not only for players to gamble on regulated websites but for unlicensed websites to seek a gambling licence and come under regulation. After all, the market here is completely open.

We need to think creatively. We already ask ISPs to block certain content. Let us apply the same mechanisms to remote gambling, where almost certainly the use of such blocks, for the reasons that I have set out, will be more successful than they are in relation to other forms of online content and in other jurisdictions. I very much hope that the Government will back Amendments 5, 6 and 7 and thereby restore integrity to the Bill.