Gambling: Fixed-odds Betting Machines
Debate between Lord Strasburger and Lord Lipsey
Lord Lipsey
I will give the noble Lord a tip for next year’s Grand National and tell him which shop to place it in.
We have had a slightly testing afternoon, so I may risk a rather racy analogy which gives my view of FOBTs. I am not very fond of them. If betting on a horse race is the full sexual intercourse of betting and gambling, with foreplay when you select your horse and mounting excitement as the race goes on—we know what happens after that, when the result comes—then FOBTs are a form of onanism. You see sad-eyed blokes—it is always blokes—in front of porn-like machines, made very glittery and unrealistic, shoving in pounds for momentary pleasure. If FOBTs evaporated into the air tomorrow, I for one should be delighted but that does not mean that I would ban them. There are a lot of pastimes that I do not much like: fox hunting, shooting and, although the noble Baroness, Lady Golding, is beside me, I have to say also fishing. However, if others wish to practise them within the law—and of course on fox hunting there is a strict law—that is their affair. Perhaps more importantly, there is the matter of unforeseen consequences.
You do not have to go into a betting shop to place a bet. The online alternative is increasingly attractive, and I cannot see much advantage in forcing determined punters to do what they do in private rather than doing it in a betting shop, where at least there is some element of sociable atmosphere. I can also see some disadvantages. I quite take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, on this: there would be a threat to the jobs of the hard-working staff—some 45,276 of them nationwide—who work in these shops. There would be a loss of tax and the loss of betting levy revenues. Those have to be weighed against the arguments we hear. Having said that—which favours the bookmakers’ arguments—I cannot believe the hash that the bookmakers have made of arguing their case on this. I cannot believe it. They were legendary lobbyists once upon a time. If William Hill or Ladbrokes came through your door, you shivered with fear and slavered to do their will. But now their approach has been that of the tobacco industry at its very worst. First, they denied that there was a problem. Then they said more research was needed—an echo of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in the debate we have just had; there is always more research needed—at the same time doing everything they could to obstruct that research by not making FOBTs available to researchers. Now, finally, their answer is to do more about problem gambling.
Of course, I welcome everything that is done about problem gambling. I applaud the work of the new Senet Group, including on gambling advertising in the windows of shops, but also more widely. I also tremendously welcome the appointment of Martin Cruddace as interim chief executive of the Association of British Bookmakers. Martin is a 21st-century man who has some possibility of helping us find a way through this difficult problem without catastrophic damage either to the betting industry or to the people of this country.
I said that the present answer of the bookmakers is to say, “We are going to fight problem gambling”. Of course I favour that very much, but I do not think it is any more likely to wash than the bookmakers’ previous defensive strategies. There is a lively academic debate about problem gambling. I will not go into it here: “Is there such a thing?”; “Is there a clear distinction between problem gambling and non-problem gambling?”; “How prevalent is it?”. I greatly applaud the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for getting this debate tonight, but the notion that one-third of those who play FOBTs are problem gamblers is not in line with the evidence.
We must do everything we can to stop the terrible affliction that genuine addictive problem gambling can do to people and their families. As far as I am concerned, it is not those who shove every penny they can get hold of into these damned machines who are the only people with a gambling problem. Anyone—anyone—who stuffs a hard-earned £100 into a slot has a gambling problem. You therefore have to tackle it across the board.
What should be done? The title of this debate refers to the growing number of FOBTs. Again, I am afraid that I have to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Clement- Jones, who I much respect. The number of machines is not rising very much. It is nearly 40,000, actually—not the 9,000 he suggested—but it is rising at only about 2% a year. Indeed, I suspect, as we speak, that it has fallen because bookmakers are closing betting shops on quite a large scale now and there will be fewer machines. I give way to the noble Lord.
Lord Strasburger (LD)
I think the noble Lord will find that although the total numbers are not changing very much, they are migrating towards the poorest areas.
Lord Lipsey
Yes, but that does not relate to the point I was making that just controlling numbers is not enough. There may be a case for local controls in some areas. I will come back to that at the end of my speech, but I think that the numbers are probably falling now. However, if you really want to put money into an FOBT, you are not going to have much trouble finding a machine; there are plenty about.
It is also true that there might be fewer betting shops on our high streets if there were a crackdown on the numbers of FOBTs. Again, with regard to unintended consequences, anyone who thinks that that would mean all the great shops and chains moving back on to the high street are deluding themselves; the only reason why there are so many betting shops on the high street is that no one else wants the premises, and they are therefore available. I would rather that our high streets consisted of well maintained betting shops than ill maintained, ramshackle, empty shops that are falling down.
So if we are not going to try to control numbers, what should we try? I think that the alternative, as has been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, is the tool we already have: a limit on the amount that you can put into the machine at once. A hundred pounds is a very high limit, is it not? It means—in theory, at least—that the punter can lose a hell of a lot of money in no time at all. It is, incidentally, the bookmakers’ adamant refusal to take the counsel of their wiser friends and reduce that amount, a refusal that I think is motivated by sheer greed and the need to feed the maws of their shareholders, that has persuaded me that they simply do not get it or, at best, that their judgment has taken second place to the size of their bonuses. Had they voluntarily reduced the top stake by one-quarter, one-half or three-quarters when problems started to emerge, I suspect that we would not be here having this debate today.
Outside bookmaking, a consensus is emerging for reducing the maximum stake substantially; the figure of £2 seems to have emerged among campaigners at the right sort of level. Going back to sex, that would turn the porn machines into a sort of page 3—if that still exists; I get confused from day to day as to whether it does—that is, mild titillation rather than hardcore, and FOBTs into something more akin to entertainment-with-prizes machines, a bit of fun rather than a serious gambling product. In my view, it is a matter for serious further consideration whether such a limit should be imposed at the national level or decided by local decision by local government.