Financial Risk Checks for Gambling

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point about the need for balance in this policy. Having spoken to a lot of the breeders and trainers in my constituency in Wiltshire, I think there is a very strong argument against these proposals. We have also heard the case for them.

The fact that this debate is so well attended and that there is so much controversy about these proposals suggests to me there is a problem with the policy-making process. When I was a civil servant at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport—in fact when my right hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock) was Secretary of State—I saw how policy making is done, and I think there is a problem with it.

The people who are the experts or are most likely to be affected by the policies that we make here are not properly involved in the deliberations that go into policy making. I wonder whether my right hon. Friend agrees. Could he make the point to the Minister that, given the degree of controversy over these proposals, we need to delay the implementation and involve a wider group of stakeholders and experts in the consultation, which should have happened before now?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

My hon. Friend has made his point through me to the Minister, who I am sure will deal with it. I will say that the consultation did not happen overnight—it has been going on for some time—but I accept that others may think that they have not had enough time. In fact, the gambling industry could have made a bigger impact by taking full part, rather than not always wanting to be intruded on by questions. As has happened with the group on many occasions, many chose to stay away.

I also make the point that few people will be impacted by the checks. Many of the concerns set out by punters involve the checks that the industry is already carrying out. It intrudes like mad on behaviour—that is the biggest area. It wants to deal with the behaviour of punters because, as we have heard, the gambling industry makes the vast majority of its money from those who are losing money at a rate of knots.

In fact, my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley made an interesting point, which I agreed with: often, those gamblers who have been successful end up being blocked. That information travels across the gambling companies, so a gambler who happens to be moderately or very successful finds themselves taken off the list of all those companies. They are not about openness, freedom and choice; they are the last people to be interested in that. We may be debating this, but they are not, because they do not want to lose money themselves.

The important point is that the gambling industry itself has not shown a huge amount of respect for the horseracing industry. Many betting shops are encouraged to cross over to FOBTs, or fixed-odds betting terminals, which are now B3s, and to SSBTs, or self-service betting terminals, which allow cash remote betting inside shops. The remote sector has long looked to cross-sell away from horserace betting to betting on other sports.

One thing that I want to make absolutely clear is that the gambling companies are not that interested in the success or the future of horseracing per se, but just in how much money they can take out of it. I am desperately keen that the horseracing industry should thrive. I absolutely believe it offers huge prospects for those in rural areas. It is a hugely successful and now global industry, and no one supports it more than I do.

I will end this by saying simply that the debate should not be about the absolute purity of no checks. We are here to look at, first, what the levels are and, secondly, how intrusive they will be. If we could achieve that and the right decision is made finally by the Minister, that will mean that the situation will be much better and, at the end of the day, that fewer people will lose their lives or become so addicted because of the desperate nature of what they have been doing in darkened rooms and behind closed doors. We want to stop that and to save lives.