Online Gambling

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for securing this important debate and for arranging the hugely successful event on Tuesday at which Peers were able to meet recovering online problem gamblers.

For too long, online gamblers have, in a very real sense, been afforded separate treatment. That is particularly inappropriate given the challenge that it presents. Online gambling is available 24/7 without even leaving your bedroom, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, has already said. As such, it is a profoundly solitary pursuit. Unlike in a betting shop, there are no members of staff in your bedroom to intervene if you exhibit a problem with gambling behaviours.

There is an irony because, for many purposes, online gambling provides a greater scope for protection than offline. Indeed, the Government recognise precisely that point in paragraph 5.19 of their current consultation, which states:

“Unlike land-based gambling, all online gambling is account-based, which means operators know who their customers are, what they are spending their money on, and their patterns of gambling. This provides opportunities for operators to use customer data to identify and minimise gambling-related harm”.


While I welcome the fact that the Government have recognised that, the proposals in their consultation do not appropriately marry the potential for protection with the measure of public concern.

Online gambling now has the highest overall problem prevalence figure, with devastating social consequences, including family breakdown, suicide and other horrifying stories that we have already heard. In that context, it is not surprising that public faith in gambling has fallen, as the noble Lord noted, from something like 49% to 34%. We have now reached a stage where we require legislative change, which currently is not proposed by the Government’s consultation. I will focus on some specific legislative changes that the Government should make, but I want first to address the matter of financial transaction blocking.

While MOSES will protect problem gamblers from legal sites, financial transaction blocking protects them from illegal sites. Although the Government rejected my amendment to require financial transaction providers not to process transactions between people in the UK and illegal sites, they accepted the need for it on a non-statutory basis. In response to that amendment, they asked the Gambling Commission to secure the agreement of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal that they would not facilitate transactions from websites accessing the UK market illegally.

I have since tabled Written Parliamentary Questions to assess the efficacy of voluntary financial transaction blocking. They reveal that, as of April 2016, the Gambling Commission had written to 60 foreign sites asking them to cease activities in the UK. Of those, three went on to obtain a licence, 41 ceased offering facilities for gambling and 11 were subject to payment blocking by payment providers. Given that there are nearly 200 countries in the world, many of which will no doubt host multiple gambling websites, the figure seems a little low to me. However, I accept that even if there are thousands of gambling websites in the world without UK Gambling Commission licences, it is only problematic from our point of view if they seek to access the UK market. I would be interested to know what the gambling websites operating legally in the UK think about those figures.

In the meantime, I have two questions for the Minister. First, does he have any more up-to-date financial transfer blocking figures for the House? Secondly, given the sustained interest of this House in the protection of UK consumers from illegal gambling, will the Minister undertake to provide a detailed annual report of the Gambling Commission’s warning to illegal sites and financial transaction blocking activities with the payment providers? That would be good for transparency and much appreciated, I am sure, by Members of your Lordships’ House.

Having addressed financial transaction blocking, I now turn to three specific areas where we need legislative change. The first and most important is MOSES. It is clear from Tuesday’s meeting that online problem gamblers view MOSES as hugely important. They were very upset about the four-year delay and exercised about the dangers of a two-tier system of self-exclusion. It is such a shame that the coalition Government did not accept the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, in March 2014. If they had done so, it is likely that MOSES would be up and running today. It is vital that this is now implemented as quickly and robustly as possible. That means that it must be introduced on a single and not a two-tiered basis, for all the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, explained. In implementing it, it is vital to remember that this is one of those areas where online protections can be made to operate more effectively online than offline.

Secondly, the time has come for the Government to look at providing a means whereby they create a single, integrated MOSES covering all legal gambling whether online or offline. That would mean that if any problem gambler self-excludes from any licensed provider of a gambling product in the UK, all such providers should be obliged to respect that self-exclusion for its duration. I am informed by experts that that would be entirely possible. It just depends on whether we have the political will. To be frank, in the context where public confidence in gambling is in free fall, we need the Government to come forward with precisely that kind of bold vision. It would really help the Prime Minister, too, in realising her goal of creating a Britain that works for everyone. If there is a concern about who should pay, I have no doubt that the industry should, as part of its customer care. However, I do not believe that it should proceed on the basis of self-regulated donations, which brings me to my third point.

Gambling creates social environmental pollution. In the same way that an actual environment-polluting business should pay, so too should a social environmental-polluting business. Ever since the Gambling Act 2005 became law, Section 123 has given the Minister regulation-making powers to introduce a statutory levy. Those powers have never been used and the industry is supposed to voluntarily donate 0.1% of its gross gambling yield. It contributes only £8 million. In a context where we have 430,000 problem gamblers needing help and a further 2 million at risk, that donation is, frankly, a joke. The Government should introduce a statutory levy requiring sufficient funds to deal with the social environmental pollution and to help manage it through MOSES. That should include the funding of a joined-up online and offline MOSES.

The final statutory change that I would like to mention pertains to the current inability of a problem gambler immediately to withdraw all money from a gambling account. If you are a problem gambler and you reach a point of resolution and want to stop gambling, amazingly, it takes three days to withdraw your money. At any stage in the process over the next 72 hours, you can cancel that application to withdraw and start gambling again. If you only manage to resist the compulsion to gamble for 24 hours and end up reversing your attempt to withdraw money, you are then back at square one. In the event that you summon up fresh strength the next day and try to withdraw again, you will then face another wait of a full three days with all that that entails. I have to say that it is hard to imagine a system that is designed to make it more impossible for problem gamblers to withdraw their money and take steps to deal with their problems, but perhaps that is the point. As legislators we simply cannot allow it to continue and I hope that the Minister will show that he is going to take some significant action.