Fixed-odds Betting Terminals

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tom Greatrex]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He is right to make that point about bet365 and the chairman of Stoke City, although I am not sure what odds he would have put on Stoke winning at the weekend and seemingly escaping relegation for another year, and near enough relegating Queens Park Rangers in the process, which I am not necessarily hugely unhappy about—I digress, Mr Deputy Speaker.

My hon. Friend is right to make a point about how this issue is sometimes characterised and how things are regulated. As I said earlier, my inclination is that we should not try to over-regulate individual behaviour. Where harm is caused, however, the Government need to take the issue seriously. The right level of regulation is always a balance that the Government need to strike on the basis of evidence, and I will come on to that. That, however, is a different position from a blanket opposition to gambling, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for intervening and allowing me to reiterate that point.

I was referring to the younger members of the Gamblers Anonymous group whom I met, and my concern has developed from those individual accounts. In recent weeks I have met those campaigning against a proliferation of these machines—people from a range of different organisations, both locally and nationally, who are concerned about their potential impact—as well as representatives from high street bookmakers. I have spoken to my own local authority, South Lanarkshire council, and received briefings from a range of organisations, including the Association of British Bookmakers. I believe the Government should be concerned about some of the issues that arose from those discussions.

As the Minister will be aware, and as I said earlier, it takes 20 seconds to complete a spin, and for each spin the maximum stake is £100.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. He has already made this point but I think it deserves repeating. The £100 spin—50 times the normal limit—is an anomaly that allows people, very easily and conveniently, to walk off the high street and into a betting shop and gamble large sums of money. I popped into my local Ladbrokes last Friday evening to put an unwise bet on a dog at Romford—a tip given to me by the former Member for Hammersmith and Fulham—so I am not anti-gambling. The only four people in that betting shop were those playing on fixed-odds betting terminals. That is not what I expect a betting shop to be.

[Tom Greatrex]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I, too, would be reticent about taking too much advice from a former Member for Hammersmith and Fulham in relation to sport.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Slaughter]

Let me try to push the Minister a little further. It is perhaps not so much the absolute numbers or even necessarily the clustering itself that is the issue, but where the clustering is taking place. In my relatively poor constituency, there are two or three times the number of betting shops as there are in neighbouring more prosperous constituencies. In Chelsea or Richmond, a third or half the number of betting shops will be found than in an area such as Shepherd’s Bush. That is the concern.

[Hugh Robertson]

The hon. Gentleman made his point very well. The rent that betting shops with machines of this kind are able to pay is crucial. Presumably, if they move to Chelsea the retail rents will rise, and that may price them out of the area. There is almost certainly a social element in all this, and I suspect that that is the answer that the hon. Gentleman hoped I would give him. We will consider all the evidence in the course of this review and the review that will be undertaken in due course by the Remote Gambling Association. I shall say more about that shortly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hugh Robertson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point. It is, indeed, in theory perfectly possible—although we will have to wait and see where the evidence from the consultation leads us—to deal with one set of machines in one way and another in another way, and we may want to do so to reflect the different reasons why people play.

[Mr Slaughter]

One piece of evidence the Minister may take into consideration is that the average spin on a B2 machine is about £15, which is seven or eight times the maximum on a B3 machine. That, rather than the possibility of spending £18,000 in an hour, is what concerns to me. This is an anomaly, because these are off-site betting opportunities, where the server is off-site, and suddenly people can gamble a much higher sum. I am sure the Minister is aware of that, although he may not be commenting on it tonight. That is a major difference with regard to the type of gambling that has just been talked about, which is available now just by walking off the street.

[Hugh Robertson]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point of which I am aware. I hope everybody who has spoken in the debate contributed to our consultation; if so, their responses will be lying there among the 9,000 that I am sure my civil servants are looking forward to wading through over the coming months.

Once again, I congratulate the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West on securing this debate; it proved a popular activity for an hour. I assure him that we are listening and that we will act on the available evidence, for all the reasons I set out tonight. We will also listen carefully to all the responses to our consultation.

Question put and agreed to.