Financial Risk Checks for Gambling

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Paul Blomfield

Monday 26th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[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.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Paul Blomfield

Monday 21st September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield]

That is certainly an additional answer.

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

The hon. Gentleman says that this is about a collapse in trust. The collapse in trust in that description is one way; that is to say with the UK Government, because they are apparently breaching treaty law. However, if he were to go to the case Kadi v. Commission, he would see that the Advocate General at the time of the case made it very clear. I want to quote this, as it is quite important:

“first and foremost, to preserve the constitutional framework created by the Treaty…it would be wrong to conclude that, once the Community is bound by a rule of international law…The relationship between international law and the Community legal order”—

that is their constitution—

“is governed by the Community legal order itself, and international law can permeate that legal order only under the conditions set by the constitutional principles of the Community.”

So the EU itself has the principle that it will vet its obligations and not necessarily implement them, as it requires.

[Paul Blomfield]

The right hon. Gentleman came back at me on the quote I gave about trust. That quote was from the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, and it was about trust in relation to the Government’s actions. In terms of how we deal with the issues that the right hon. Gentleman refers to, I will come on to those subsequently.

The Government’s cavalier disregard for the rule of law has been condemned by the Law Society and by the Bar Council. It has shocked people across the country, and it has disturbed our friends and allies around the world. Part of the tragedy of the Government’s actions is that they never needed to do this. Instead of throwing their toys out of the pram, there was a grown-up solution there in the Northern Ireland protocol itself: the dispute resolution mechanisms agreed by the Prime Minister, to which the Minister has referred at length and which have been utilised already on other issues. However, in recognising those, the Minister failed to explain to the House satisfactorily why the Government have chosen not to exercise that route and have instead put this proposed legislation before the House. Article 16 provides for either the EU or the UK to take unilateral safeguard measures:

“If the application of this Protocol leads to serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties”,

and annex 7, to which I think he alluded, sets out the process to which matters can be resolved through the Joint Committee set up to oversee the implementation of the withdrawal agreement.

Do not take my word for it. The former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox), who I seem to recall was once celebrated in the Conservative party, made the case in The Times last week when he said:

“There are clear and lawful responses available to Her Majesty’s Government”,

which

“include triggering the agreed independent arbitration procedure set out in the withdrawal agreement and, in extremis, these might legitimately extend to taking temporary and proportionate measures, where they are urgently necessary to protect the fundamental interests of the UK”.

That was his conclusion. And the Prime Minister could not answer my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) at the Liaison Committee last week when he asked the simple question why he had not been prepared to use those measures, which he negotiated, to resolve any disagreements, rather than engage in lawbreaking.

So let me ask the Minister a simple question, which I hope he will come back to at the end of this very long debate, on the question of state aid. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), said it was a matter for the Joint Committee. Will the Minister be able to confirm in his winding up whether the Government have actually raised their concerns there for resolution?

Our amendments seek to put the Bill right. They reassert our commitment to the rule of law by removing the notwithstanding clauses, which have been the subject of so much attention, but also the other references to disapplying the protocol and disregarding the law.