Financial Risk Checks for Gambling

Iain Duncan Smith Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

It is a privilege to speak in this debate under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I apologise if I have to disappear briefly at 6 o’clock for a charity meeting, but I pledge to be back before the wind-ups.

The hon. Member—in this case, my hon. Friend—for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) has made most of the strong case that exists, but I want to touch on a few particular points. It seems to me that this debate should not be for or against affordability checks, and I do not think it really is. In fact, my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) invariably ends up being in the right place on some of these points. He made the case, rightly, for a debate about what levels there should be, how this all works, and who should and should not be in. I thought that was quite interesting.

I want to come back to my hon. Friend’s point about the need for checks to be frictionless. I agree. If there are to be checks, they need to be as frictionless and as unobtrusive as possible, because they are about the early onset of issues and problems. They should act as flags and be the nudge that says, “Something isn’t right here”, rather than an absolute shutting down, as it were.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley made three points, including whether net deposits should be used or not, that CATO checks will not work—I completely agree—and that score data is an issue here; I also agree. All those points are really important, and I recommend them to the Minister.

It is important to understand that I was never really in favour of these checks originally, when I first started. However, having spent time with the charities and people who have lost members of their family, I think one point comes across time and again: if there had been an early moment in the process when either the people concerned had realised what they were up to or others had been able to say, “Stop, stop! Where are you going with this?”, many of those disasters would not have happened.

We need to look at the issue in the context of how we can stop the early onset of addiction and the process that takes place, as we would do with anything else. It is a human issue; it is not a principle of freedom versus non-freedom. During many hundreds of years in this place, we have dealt many times with issues where absolute freedoms have had to be constrained to some degree, but we limit that as much as we possibly can be. That is the case in this process, which is why I think we should be able to settle on that here.

First of all, I do not have a racecourse in my constituency, but I used to have a dog track. It was a very famous dog track, but it closed because the owners decided that they could make more money through online gambling rather than allowing people to come to the stadium and bet, which I had done in the past. I have to say, I, like anybody—well, perhaps not everybody—like to go to race meets, and I like to bet on horses because it makes it more exciting. I always try and go to the ring to do that. Racecourse owners have done no good to the ring, which is really proper betting; in many cases, they have pushed it further and further away from the smart stadiums. The people there were the ones who would occasionally say to someone, “You know you’ve already bet on this. Are you sure you want to put this bet?” I have had that happen—no, I haven’t, but I have seen others get it on a number of occasions, and I have stood up for them when they have had these problems.

This is not about being against gambling; it is about being against the untrammelled levels that affect those who are most vulnerable. That is the key. Let us make very clear what is not on the table. As things stand, there are no checks for on-course bookmakers, and none are planned. I would be against that should we decide to go down that road. This is important, and the same point exists for land gambling. We are not planning to check or stop that in the same way as online, which I will come back to in a second.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Christina Rees) on her thoughtful and balanced introduction to the debate. I find it fascinating that so many of the contributions to it have been about the horseracing industry. I had to check the petition again, because it mentions the horseracing industry only in the last sentence, as an afterthought. We would all want to defend and protect the horseracing industry, but I fear that in this debate it is being used as a wedge by a gambling industry that is using something for which there is great affection in order to prevent something that is doing much wider harm.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I apologise for intervening on the hon. Member, but this has been the case all along and in all the inquiries. The real damage lies in the slots, the fast gambling and the speed of all those chases, not in something that takes about four or five minutes to finish. This is all about the speed of gambling and the incentive to gamble quickly, quietly and in the darkness of one’s own room.

[Paul Blomfield]

I thank the right hon. Member, my friend in this context, for his intervention. He has done such good work on this issue, and on this point he is absolutely right.

I have become involved in gambling reform only in the past six years or so, following the death of one of my constituents, Jack Ritchie, as a result of gambling addiction. What I learned from the tragedy of Jack’s death was that often when people take their own lives it is because they are overwhelmed not by gambling debt, but by the addiction itself. When I talked to Jack’s parents, they were very clear—this echoes a point that the right hon. Member has made—that if there had been checks, balances and preventive measures in place at an early stage of Jack’s journey into addiction, it could have transformed the tragic outcome when he took his life.

Jack is not alone. According to Public Health England, over 400 people take their lives each year as a result of gambling. A recent Gambling Commission survey, which I think has been mentioned, found that 2.5% of the population—over 1.5 million people—score over eight on the problem gambling severity index.