Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill
Debate between Viscount Astor and Lord Mancroft
Viscount Astor
My Lords, my name is attached to this amendment as I fully understand the arguments made by the casinos sector. It is in what one might call an unfair position at the moment. I understand that my noble friend the Minister is not unsympathetic to those arguments.
As I understand it, the difficulty is that the department, while having what one might call fruitful discussions on the issue, believes that the solution can be progressed safely and satisfactorily through secondary legislation. Of course, it would be helpful if the outline of that secondary legislation could be agreed before we get to Third Reading but I accept that this is a complicated area—the more so as one looks at it and realises what can be accessed online, whether with one’s own machine or one provided by a casino. I understand that the Government want to get this right.
I presume that my noble friend the Minister will want to come back again and say that secondary legislation is the right way to proceed with this issue. I will accept his assurance provided that he can give one bit of comfort to us: that, once this Bill has completed its passage through the House, the issue will not be kicked into the long grass and forgotten but will still be dealt with. It should be looked at carefully and as speedily as possible. I am sure that it will be, so that we can have a solution that is satisfactory to all those concerned.
Lord Mancroft
My Lords, I, too, put my name to the amendment in Grand Committee. Amazing though it may sound to your Lordships, the Prime Minister manages to travel the world without my company so, unlike my noble friend Lord Astor, I cannot claim that I was in China. I cannot actually remember where I was, but it was not in China.
There is no need to explain the background: my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones has done that adequately. Reading the Hansard of Committee stage to prepare for this evening, I noticed that my noble friend Lord Flight—who, sadly, is not in his place this evening—described the anomaly that my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones talked about and which the amendment is intended to address as a silly anomaly. Nonsense, he called it. He said that the amendment in its previous incarnation was straightforward and common sense. That was quite right. He also described the Government’s position at the time as pretty silly, and he was quite right about that too.
In Committee, the Minister talked about basing remote gaming around existing machine rules—I think I have quoted him correctly on that. It was that which really drew my attention to this, because I have history on legislation in gambling regulation. That is the sort of thing that leads to ineffective and bad regulation. That is exactly what the previous Government tried to do when a new class of gaming machine came out. That is the problem that we now have with what are called fixed-odds betting terminals, which are not betting terminals at all: they are gaming machines. It is really important when new machines and new forms of gambling appear that we regulate them correctly and do not try to fit them into boxes that are not really there. That is what I would call the DCMS’s attempt at the King Canute style of regulation, holding back the waves of new technology. That is what we did before and we must be very careful not to do it again in this case. My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones’s amendment is an attempt to address that.
In truth, I think that the Government have now accepted the principle of what my noble friend’s amendment is intended to do; I hope that they have. The debate before us this evening is really about whether it is better to put it in primary or secondary legislation. I know that, originally, the Government’s view was that this was not the right legislative vehicle. I have heard that before so many times. I am not quite sure what the right legislative vehicle is, but I am absolutely certain that the general public do not care; they just want it done. As my noble friend Lord Astor said, the right legislative vehicle—any legislative vehicle—does not come along very often, so when one comes along, you want to grab it.
If the amendment is to be withdrawn and the Government are to move forward in a different direction, the Minister should give your Lordships a commitment on a timetable, so that this does not just drag on and on, as issues have before. The problem with secondary legislation is that it is impossible to amend. If that is the route that the Government are determined to go down, my understanding is that the industry is not happy with it and would much prefer primary legislation but, obviously, like any industry, it will take what it can get. It seems to the industry, and it certainly seems to me, that primary legislation is the right vehicle for this. Unless the Minister can give us a very good reason why it is not, that is what we should do. There is quite enough flexibility in the provision. I think that your Lordships deserve the Government’s commitment to a timetable and to flexibility for the industry to make sure that we get this right. Unless we have those commitments, I see no reason not to take the view of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones and pass the amendment. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.