Financial Risk Checks for Gambling

Bill Wiggin Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Christina Rees]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. I am getting a tour of constituency racecourses—this little woman from Wales is learning all about geography today. I agree that the proposals should be measured.

The proposed checks will not affect such customers at all. It is important not to conflate the views of industry with the views of consumers. Affordability checks are not about attacking consumer rights or curbing individual liberties, but about upholding consumer protections and curbing operator excess.

[Sir Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

The hon. Lady says it is not about anything other than protecting consumers, but can she think of any other activity where the Government check how much money someone has?

[Christina Rees]

Payday loan sharks might be an example, but I am sure the Minister will respond in due course—I think I slipped out of that one, or I tried to. The responsibility lies with industry and operators, not customers.

In summary, it is understandable that industry bodies, operators and the horseracing community have concerns about the introduction of financial risk checks, but the idea of introducing checks is not new, and the need for regulation against harmful betting is supported by industry and consumers alike. The issue seems to be that such checks need to be frictionless, without negative impact on punters or operator revenue, and without pushing vulnerable gamblers into the black market. It would be useful if the Minister took this opportunity to outline how frictionless checks will work and when pilot schemes will be introduced.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to be able to speak in this debate, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Neath (Christina Rees) for introducing it. I am even more grateful to the more than 100,000 people who signed the petition; it reached 100,000 people calling for the debate in only 27 days. Some 1,200 of the signatures are from Newmarket in my constituency—my constituency is called West Suffolk, but the vast majority of the signatures are from Newmarket. Being here feels like the start of a horse race as I am surrounded by so many colleagues and it is so busy in here today. I have been contacted by other Members, including two Ministers, who wanted to speak in this debate but cannot, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), the former Chancellor. This issue is huge and I do not want to leave the Minister with the impression that affordability checks are a side issue; they are absolutely central to the future of horseracing. We are making a mistake, so we must stop and start again, and I will set out why.

I bow to no one in caring about and paying regard to the problems of gambling harms. I have seen them for myself; I have spoken to those who have lost children to gambling. As the Culture Secretary, I introduced the limits on fixed-odds betting terminals, or FOBTs, which were far below the recommended rate. I overruled the official advice to bring in the £2 limit, with the support of the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). We worked together on that.

I care deeply about gambling harms and as both a former Culture Secretary and a former Health Secretary, I understand them. However, these proposals, as they are being introduced, will make the gambling harms worse. The PwC report published recently showed that the amount staked by UK online gamblers on the unregulated market in 2020 had doubled to £2.8 billion in the previous one to two years. In December 2022, more than 250,000 people visited unregulated black market sites, compared with only 80,000 during the same month the previous year. That has a huge impact on horseracing, which I will come on to, but also on gambling-related harm. Online casinos—games of chance rather than games of skill—are a serious problem that need addressing. I would recommend that the limit of £5 being proposed by some is reduced to £2. We should be extremely tough on games of chance, which are programmed algorithmically to ensure that people lose money. I do not think anybody in this debate would oppose the introduction of measures to resist those types of addictions, for addictions they are.

As I say, I bow to nobody in my support for measures to tackle problem gambling, but I am afraid to say that, having examined the evidence, I am convinced that introducing these measures—not just as they are being proposed, but as they are actually being brought in—is increasing gambling harms and not decreasing them. We should not fall for the old adage of, “We have a problem, and we must do something; this is something, therefore we must do it.” I am afraid to say that the current proposals will make problems worse rather than reducing them.

Many of the offshore gambling firms explicitly target those signed up to the GAMSTOP service and there is a grim irony that the regulator and the Government are, unfortunately, making the problem worse.

A couple of Members have said that the checks have already been introduced by the industry; the hon. Member for Neath said that they had already been introduced “voluntarily”. I am afraid to say that I do not think that is true. The gambling industry, for which I have absolutely no regard, is introducing checks now in the shadow of expected future regulation, because it knows about the Gambling Commission—indeed, it is regulated by the Gambling Commission. These things are not being introduced “voluntarily”; they are being brought in because the gambling companies think that further regulation is coming down the track. We are already seeing the negative impact in the uptake of black market offshore gambling, as I have already said, and we are already seeing the impact on the horseracing industry.

I am incredibly lucky to represent Newmarket. Horseracing is the UK’s second largest sport, with 5 million racegoers annually, generating over £4 billion for the economy and untold soft power. In Newmarket, 7,000 people are employed in or around horseracing, which puts a quarter of a billion pounds into the local economy. In addition to all of that, it creates the joy that so many of us have spoken about.

We know that 26% of bettors have already experienced an affordability check, ahead of the proposals officially coming in. We have seen that the betting turnover on racing fell by £900 million in 2022-23. The financial impact on the horseracing industry is already happening. Prize money is going up in the rest of the world but is incredibly tight in the United Kingdom. The impact is biggest on the small racecourses, but there is even an impact on Newmarket, which hosts the two finest racecourses in the world.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

One of the two!

[Matt Hancock]

I certainly will not have that challenged.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

The industry estimates that this will cost it £50 million. Does the right hon. Member agree that if we can separate the challenges of problem gambling from the joy and importance of horseracing, which employs 80,000 people, perhaps progress is possible? However, at the moment that is not clear.

[Matt Hancock]

Absolutely. Horseracing already has its own legislative framework; it has had it since Churchill introduced the Tote. There is already in law a definition of and a separation of horseracing. I recommend that the Government separate games of chance, in which there is no skill and there are guaranteed losses, from horseracing, which is one of this country’s finest achievements and brings joy to so many.

Let me turn to “frictionless”, which we have heard a lot about. I was thrilled when the Minister said at the Dispatch Box that checks would be frictionless; he has said it here and he said it in the White Paper. Here we come to something of a constitutional point, if I may say so. The Gambling Commission has interpreted the Minister saying checks will be frictionless as meaning “frictionless for the vast majority”, which is different. These checks, if they are to happen at all, should be frictionless. The Minister has committed to that and it is Government policy, yet we have a regulator wrongly misinterpreting “frictionless” as “frictionless for the vast majority”. It is a distinct problem. Also, if checks are frictionless, they have to be based on data that people have already consented to make publicly available. If somebody looks at one’s bank account details, there has to be friction, because they will need permission to look at those details, so there is already a problem with implementing frictionless checks.

The hon. Member for Swansea East made the point that it is difficult to see why people would worry about these checks or why they would go to unregulated online sites. There are two responses to that. The first is that people fear the Government looking into their financial affairs. The second is a practical point: it is happening. That is how people are responding to these proposals. I know it is happening among my constituents, because they tell me on the doorsteps. They are changing the way they place bets, because of fears about what the Government are going to look at. We need to recognise reality in this place. We cannot just wish away people’s behavioural response, which is making the tackling of problem gambling worse rather than better.

Any jockey knows when a race is going wrong. I surely do. With this one, I say to the Minister that it is time to return to the stalls and start again.