Gambling Harm (Social and Economic Impact of the Gambling Industry Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Colville. I agree with everything he said on both loot boxes and unconventional games that are currently not classified as gambling. I will not repeat any of it, but I agree with pretty much everything he said on those issues.

I declare my membership of Peers for Gambling Reform. I am also a vice-president of the LGA and the NALC.

I begin, as I think everyone has, by welcoming this important report and the clear and powerful introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Grade. As everyone has noted, this was published two years ago and yet we are here today. Often, when we talk about reports, we say that things have moved on, but none of the issues covered by this report has got any better in the last two years.

Those are two lost years during which, as we have discussed, so many individuals and families have suffered so much, but communities have also suffered. I want to focus on those communities—the place-based damage which is highlighted in the report—but the Government’s response is sadly lacking in acknowledgement of the damage done to communities; it acknowledges the individual but not the community damage.

When we think about what has moved on since then, the focus in the past few months has been the cost of living crisis. We have heard a lot of talk about gambling as a leisure activity, an optional thing, so one might expect that the gambling industry would be seeing a big collapse when there are reports out just today that more than 2 million meals have been handed out at food banks in the past year and almost one in 10 parents expects to go to a food bank in the next three months. You might think, “Well, people won’t have money for gambling.”

However, we need to think about what gambling is for very many people. It is not a pleasure or a leisure activity; it is a tax on desperation, on people’s desire for some kind of hope. They cannot see anything improving in their day-to-day life, with their zero-hours contract, gig economy job, low wages and costs going up and up. In that moment when you put down a bet, you think, “This could really make a difference, things could change.” You know that the chances of that happening are vanishingly small, but you really need that moment of hope. It is a very human need to think, “Suddenly things could be much better for me.” That is a tax on the state of our society.

I agree with many things that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans said in his powerful speech, but the report powerfully highlights the link between sport and gambling. We have seen a perversion of sport: it has become a vehicle for gambling. We talk about gambling being a leisure activity. How many other leisure activities have effectively been denied to people? We think about sport. We might hope that people might have watched that Premier League football game and then gone out to the local football pitch, had a kickaround and tried to recreate the brilliant free kick they had just seen, but, very likely, that local football pitch has been privatised and now has a significant charge for access to it. So many other leisure alternatives have been closed off.

Again, picking up on what the right reverend Prelate said, paragraph 524 of the report is worth highlighting. It is the report of a carefully considered, evidence-based Select Committee investigation. It says:

“Gambling operators should no longer be allowed to advertise on the shirts of sports teams or any other part of their kit. There should be no gambling advertising in or near any sports grounds or sports venues, including sports programmes.”


That is the carefully considered recommendation of a committee of your Lordships’ House. The right reverend Prelate’s comparison with tobacco is interesting. There was a huge row and expressions of concern when tobacco was banned from such advertising, and from all the advertising, but no one would go back now. We have in view the idea of zero tobacco: think of what social progress that is.

The Gambling Commission’s chief executive Andrew Rhodes gave a speech this month which pointed out that the gross yield for the gambling industry equates to taking £450 a second off customers in the UK. That is a lot of money. He made a very interesting comparison. He said that the industry is worth some £14 billion, which is roughly the same size as the agriculture industry. Elsewhere in your Lordships’ House, we are rightly having lots of debates about food security. We have an industry that is the same size as the industry feeding us, but it is the gambling industry.

When I was putting this speech together, I thought, “I’m going to come out here sounding like a real radical by saying, ‘Let’s shape our society according to what kind of society we’d like to have’”. But I had some unexpected support earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Butler, who in our previous debates has identified himself as a Treasury man. We heard the Treasury man say, “We want to think about and shape the size of gambling in our economy, and how we might better allocate the resources to see that capital used to create more and better jobs”. I thank him for that support; I was very pleased to hear it.

Coming to the point of not just the broader issue of the general economy, in paragraph 112 this report clearly focuses on how the damage done by the industry is not evenly spread across the country. Go down to Chelsea, or up to some of the posh bits of Manchester, and you will not find very much sign of the gambling industry. The report cites evidence that

“‘more than half of the nation’s 6,000 bookies are in the UK’s most deprived areas’, and that 56% of all the big four’s betting shops are … in the top 30% most deprived areas in England”.

I put it to the Minister that if we are, as I believe, to expect a levelling-up Bill in the Queen’s Speech then action to address gambling, particularly place-based gambling, should surely be in that Bill.

Looking at the time I have spoken already, I am not going to go through this report in great detail, but I want to go back to the Local Government Association and highlight a couple of points made in the detailed briefing that it released on this debate. If people have not looked at that, I really urge them to do so because it very much addresses how concerned our local authorities are about their lack of powers, or inadequate powers, to deal with this place-based situation. Although we often focus on what is happening on the internet, a lot of this damage is still very place-based. The Local Government Association is calling for more flexible powers for councils to determine the number and location of local gambling premises in their area, and the levelling-up Bill might very well help with that.

I have focused mostly on area-based issues but also want briefly to address problem gambling and the need for treatment for gambling addiction. Again, the Local Government Association is calling for the mandatory levy. We saw this on big tobacco, and the “polluter pays” principle has become a big thing, given Grenfell and the Building Safety Bill that we were debating yesterday. Surely, we need “big bet” to pay its way for the damage that it is causing.

My final thought is that, as I think the right reverend Prelate and several other speakers referred to, we saw a huge change to and growth in gambling after 2005. That was a result of policy choices and decisions made by government that gave us the position we have today. Very often we are told, “Oh, we can’t regulate or control—we can’t create new rules. That’s restrictive and anti-liberty”. But choices were made that allowed the situation we have today, and they allowed the industry to operate at vast profit without paying taxes or for the damage it is causing. It is not a case of acting or not acting; we have acted and created where we are now. We can act to create a different kind of model for society.