Public Bodies (Merger of the Gambling Commission and the National Lottery Commission) Order 2013

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, the short speech I was planning to make has changed dramatically as a result of the Minister’s opening speech, which I very much welcome. I was going to raise the conflict of interest between the Gambling Commission and the National Lottery Commission, an issue which the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee picked up on and which I referred to during Committee on the Public Bodies Bill in March 2011. I made the point that from the inception of the National Lottery, the National Lottery Commission has operated with an inherent conflict of interest in that, as the Minister said, it is required to maximise the return for good causes but at the same time is supposed to protect players’ interests. I do not believe that the National Lottery Commission has, up to now, succeeded in doing that.

In drawing attention to this during Committee on the Public Bodies Bill, I expressed the hope that the merger of the two bodies would be resolved in future. The Minister was not quite right to say that the previous Administration had supported this merger. The Joint Committee on the draft Gambling Bill supported it, but the Government of the time unfortunately rejected the merger of the two bodies. To avoid wearying the Committee now, I will not quote what Lord McIntosh said for the Government on that occasion about those being two different jobs.

I listened very carefully to what the Minister said about how in future this conflict will be resolved. I want to read carefully what he has said, but the objections that I raised in March 2011 on the Public Bodies Bill seem substantially to have been met by what he has said this afternoon. I would like just one assurance, if he is able to give it to me: that he feels that the resources available to the Gambling Commission will be sufficient to do this job properly, because along with the obvious need for the National Lottery to be a success, player protection is very important.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for his explanation of the order. I also thank him for the helpful information that he sent in advance of the debate, including the letter from Hugh Robertson to the chair of the Gambling Commission. I will return to that letter and that issue shortly.

First, I make the more general point that I understand that much of the impetus for this merger is to save money, and I do not doubt that there are savings to be made. I know that the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report questioned the figures provided and felt that the overall savings should be greater. It is of course incumbent on any organisation in receipt of public money to spend that money wisely. I hope that the Gambling Commission will be held to account for this expenditure in due course.

However, I will not focus on the financial implications as I want to explore other, more pressing issues with the Minister this afternoon. We share the growing concern that gambling is running out of control. The spiralling rise of online gambling, now a £2 billion a year industry, risks damaging the health and well-being of a generation. We already know that nearly 1 million people are in danger of becoming problem gamblers and that there are already 500,000 hard-core addicts. Meanwhile, one of the Gambling Commission’s clear functions is already to protect children and vulnerable adults from being harmed or exploited by gambling, so by most measures it would appear that it is failing in that task. In that context, we need to be satisfied that the proposed merger is in the public interest and that the new, merged Gambling Commission is fit for purpose in the light of this crisis. Therefore, I should like to ask the Minister some questions.

First, is there a danger that we are rushing this decision without giving the proposal adequate consideration? The Commons Select Committee that considered this matter made two important recommendations, which need to be addressed before a final decision is made. Regrettably, I do not think that Hugh Robertson’s letter adequately addresses these issues. I take the point that we have had very little time to consider that letter. For example, the Select Committee recommended that the Gambling Commission outline the governance arrangements that it will put in place to ensure that there is a robust separation of its duties to oversee the lottery and gambling organisations to avoid the conflicts of interest to which my noble friend referred. It recommended that the details be published by the Gambling Commission in time for consideration of the order in this House. I agree that this information would have been extremely useful if it had been before us today, but it does not seem to have been provided by the Gambling Commission, unless my internet searches have failed on this occasion.

What is more, I do not believe that its original suggestion that it would set up a sub-committee to deal with lottery issues is adequate to address the governance issues. The Select Committee also recommended that the DCMS outline what steps it would take to monitor the Gambling Commission’s execution of its combined duties and what action it proposed to take if it was seen not to be acting even-handedly. I understand that Hugh Robertson’s letter is intended to address this issue by setting out what the DCMS would like to see in the management agreement with the Gambling Commission. However, we have not seen the response to Hugh Robertson’s letter from the Gambling Commission, and I should like to hear what it has to say on the matter.

Incidentally, the Minister also asked the Gambling Commission to put his letter on its website in time for this debate, but at midday today I could not find it there. Again, that might be a failure on the part of my internet search skills, but at the moment there seems to be an ominous silence from the Gambling Commission.

Also, the Minister’s letter does not adequately address the Select Committee’s question about what action the DCMS would take if, for example, there was evidence that the funding of good causes was suffering as a result of the merger. Therefore, first, given that the Select Committee’s report on this issue was published on only 2 July and that, as I understand it, the Commons will not be considering this order until September, does the Minister not think that a decision on the order should be delayed to allow all the information to be presented to this House and fully considered?

Secondly, the Minister will be aware that there are anomalies in how the National Lottery is treated compared with other society lotteries—for example, in the specified percentage required to be given to good causes and the duty of 12% that is paid to government. I gather that the DCMS is due to hold a consultation on the minimum that should be donated to good causes, and I welcome that. Also, as I understand it, the recent High Court judgment on the status of the Health Lottery, run by Richard Desmond, ruled that this was a matter for government rather than the courts. Would this merger not have been a convenient time to address these issues and the protections that need to be put in place to regulate other society and commercial lotteries that may be established?

Thirdly, is the Minister satisfied that the Gambling Commission is operating in a sufficiently transparent way? The vast majority of society lotteries raise significant sums of money for the causes which they support, but the percentage of income which they donate varies considerably. I tried to explore this a little in a recent Written Question to the Minister. In his reply, he said that the commission publishes aggregates of the financial details of these schemes. However, is that really good enough? Does the Minister feel that the Gambling Commission could do more to share information about the individual profits and donations of these lottery schemes, and, again, does he feel that this could have been addressed as part of the merger?

Crucial to any changes has to be the need to protect the £2 billion given to good causes by the National Lottery, which has become a respected national institution. The Gambling Commission could do more to reassure us that it has robust governance systems in place to ring-fence and nurture the development of the lottery while cracking down on exploitative commercial and on-line gambling.

I hope the Minister will address these concerns and more fully consider a postponement of the final decision on this order to allow for the letters to be read and for all the information to be presented to us in a proper form so that scrutiny can take place. I look forward to hearing his response to these questions.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, I should have put on the record at the start of my speech my entry in the register. I am a gambling regulator as a member of the Alderney Gambling Control Commission.