Lord Browne of Belmont
Main Page: Lord Browne of Belmont (Democratic Unionist Party - Life peer)Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill
Lord Browne of Belmont Excerpts
Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)
My Lords, I am very pleased to speak in support of Amendment 1 because it is of fundamental importance. If this Bill is not endowed with a credible form of enforcement so that unlicensed operators are prevented from accessing the UK market then, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has explained, the notion that this Bill is about consumer protection breaks down. Its primary impact will instead be a truly dramatic change to online gambling advertising in the UK.
I am particularly grateful to the noble Baroness for raising this issue throughout the passage of the Bill and particularly for the excellent seminar that she hosted for Peers last week, which was fascinating. It comprised two central presentations, one from the online gambling provider Paddy Power explaining why, from the perspective of online gambling providers, the provision of proper enforcement is absolutely key, and a second presentation from a charity, CARE, whose prime concern is the care of problem gamblers, which also argued passionately for the provision of credible enforcement.
In managing to create a coalition between the online gambling industry and problem gambler charities, the Government have really accomplished quite a feat. On a more serious note, it seems to me that if such disparate groups with such disparate aims and objectives are prepared to come together to present basically the same argument, the Government need to pause and take note. Paddy Power made it very clear that the online gambling industry is growing very quickly right across the world and that there are lots of small providers which will be tempted to access the United Kingdom market without getting a licence. The point was made very powerfully that the Government cannot possibly hope to chase these multiple small providers through the courts of multiple jurisdictions. It would cost far too much and take far too long. The small providers know that the chances of them being prosecuted, let alone convicted, are absolutely tiny and that it is a risk well worth taking.
In this context, the online gambling industry and the charity sector are very clear that financial transaction blocking is the best way forward. The Government, of course, have resisted this argument, claiming that the evidence for FTB is mixed. If by this they mean that it is not 100% successful, then I agree with them, but the notion that in order to be suitable an enforcement mechanism must be 100% effective is problematic for two reasons. First, in my experience, very few public policy solutions can make that claim. Secondly, the enforcement mechanism promoted by the Government—prosecution—is far less likely to be successful than FTB. Of course, I read with interest the letter from the Minister yesterday announcing that, despite earlier statements, the Government have now consented to a self-regulatory approach to prohibiting payments with three providers. That is a very welcome turnaround, but it is not a credible solution. The integrity of this Bill clearly requires a statutory solution that covers all providers.
This Bill has so far travelled from DCMS to the Commons and now through the Lords to Report stage without a single amendment. As a revising Chamber, we are here to detect problems and put them right. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has spotted a fundamental problem. I do not believe that we should allow this Bill to complete its passage through your Lordships’ House without the insertion of the clear enforcement mechanism presented by Amendment 1. I strongly urge noble Lords to support this very important, seminal amendment.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, I want to associate myself fully with the remarks just made by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and with the powerful and comprehensive speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, in introducing the amendment. I do not intend to repeat the points they made so powerfully, but I shall add a general consideration. With the introduction of the internet, we are living through a revolution that is probably more powerful than the invention of steam power or the internal combustion engine. One does not want to be critical of the many benefits that flow from the internet revolution but it brings with it, at every point, corresponding dangers of which the Government need to be very aware. If in doubt, I would say that the balance of the argument comes down on putting in place powers to regulate and prevent the abuses that the internet can open up. I hope that general consideration will support the specific points so powerfully made in the debate so far.
“Remote operating licence
(1) Section 89 of the Gambling Act 2005 (remote operating licence) is amended as follows.
(2) After subsection (1) insert—
“(1A) The Commission shall hold a list of persons who have registered to be excluded from access to remote gambling websites.
(1B) It shall be a condition of a remote operating licence that an operator must exclude any person access who has registered for self-exclusion with the Commission under subsection (1A).””
Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)
My Lords, the Government have been very clear that this Bill is about consumer protection. As others have noted, this was made very clear by the Minister, Helen Grant MP, in another place when she said that the new licensing proposals address,
“the fundamental purpose of the Bill, which is to enhance consumer protection by ensuring that all operators offering remote gambling in Britain are regulated by the Gambling Commission, whether they are based in Britain or overseas”.—[Official Report, Commons, Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill Committee, 19/11/13; col. 75.]
As has also been pointed out, though, that statement makes sense only if the new requirement for all online gambling providers based beyond the UK to obtain a UK gambling commission licence is backed by a parallel provision preventing those that do not have a licence from accessing the UK market.
In that context, the main effect of the Bill, far from enhancing consumer protection, is actually to place it under greater pressure by dramatically widening the scope for online gambling advertising in the UK. Rather than enhancing consumer protection, the Bill’s principal implication will consequently be to make the British people more aware of gambling opportunities, and not just any such opportunities but opportunities associated with a far higher problem gambling prevalence figure than gambling generally. While the basic 2010 problem prevalence figure was 0.9% for online, it was over 9% on an annual basis and over 17% on a monthly basis.
Mindful of that, I find the intervention of the Secretary of State over the weekend rather odd. She has said that she wants to clamp down on gambling advertising, yet her department is at the same time introducing dramatic online gambling licensing liberalisation. I am genuinely at a loss to know how these two commitments fit together. Estimates differ, but it is widely recognised that the UK embraces about 450,000 problem gamblers. That may not seem very many as a proportion of the total population, but it is a very significant number of people in absolute terms. We rightly devote very considerable care and attention to other social challenges that affect similar numbers of people, yet we do not seem to accord problem gambling the same level of concern or attention.
Problem gambling is a very debilitating condition that takes over people’s lives and destroys them. Last week, I was privileged to hold a briefing on this amendment in the Palace of Westminster that was addressed by two recovering problem gamblers who bravely shared their stories. Justyn, aged 45, and Dino, aged 36, developed gambling problems relatively recently, within the past four years or so. Of particular interest for the purposes of the Bill, which liberalises online gambling advertising, is that they both began online gambling in response to adverts they had seen promoting free bets. In one case, the advertising was at a sporting event; in the other, it was on a bus. The destructive impact of problem gambling on both was remarkably similar. They got into difficulty relatively quickly and ended up losing their jobs and families and became hugely involved in debt.
They both said that one of the problems with online gambling is the fact that it is available 24/7 with no natural barriers, such as those pertaining to a betting shop. You do not have to leave the house to gamble, and there is no closing time. They also highlighted that it is an enormously solitary experience without any kind of accountability to fellow humans. One of them even ended up selling his son’s christening presents to raise funds to feed his habit. It is a matter of great concern to me that this Bill, which is supposed to be about consumer protection, not only proposes making life much more difficult for problem gamblers, such as Justin and Dino, but completely fails to take any balancing or compensating steps to help them.
In this regard, the failure to do so is further compounded by the fact that online gamblers are already seriously disadvantaged in terms of the support available to them when compared with terrestrial gamblers. One of the key mechanisms for helping problem gamblers is self-exclusion. Problem gamblers, like other addicts, experience days when they are stronger and days when they are weaker. On a stronger day, a problem gambler can get around the five betting shops in his town and self-exclude for a fixed period—say, six months—and thereby cut himself off from local gambling opportunities for the period in question, during which time he can seek help and try to put his life back together again. Crucially, however, the same provision does not have the same effect for online problem gamblers. On a strong day, the online problem gambler can self-exclude from five online gambling providers, but he cannot cut himself off from all locally available online gambling opportunities because there will still be hundreds, if not thousands, of online gambling providers that remain equally accessible from his bedroom.
Not only do online problem gamblers have to exclude themselves far more times to cut themselves off from locally available gambling opportunities, they would have to self-exclude to an extent that is physically impossible. Mindful of the fact that self-excluding once is a difficult step for a problem gambler to take, the idea of doing it hundreds, if not thousands of times, simply is not credible.
Given this problem, it is my firm belief that we should provide online problem gamblers with the credible form of self-exclusion promoted by my amendment. Amendment 7 proposes that instead of trying to self-exclude from multiple online gambling websites, online problem gamblers should have the option of self-excluding just once to the Gambling Commission. The Gambling Commission would then relay the self-exclusion to all online providers with Gambling Commission licences and all such providers would be required to honour the terms of the self-exclusion as a condition of their licence.
The need for a one-stop shop online self-exclusion mechanism was demonstrated clearly through the testimony of the online problem gamblers who came to Parliament last week. Justyn Larcombe said that had a one-stop shop self-exclusion mechanism been in place in 2012 it could have saved his marriage. Justyn, with the support of his wife, made the difficult decision to self-exclude from the online gambling site he had been using. The reality of his self-exclusion provided both Justyn and his wife with a real sense of security. It was, however, only a matter of time before he saw adverts for other online gambling websites and, three months on, he had been fully set back into using alternative sites. When his long-suffering wife found out, that was it; she left him.
Dino Panayi, meanwhile, explained how he had managed to self-exclude from 25 websites but, in words that all too eloquently sum up the problem, he said:
“The problem is, there is always another website”.
Again, he was adamant that a one-stop shop self-exclusion mechanism would make a real and practical difference to their lives. Of course, neither was suggesting that the one-stop shop was a magic wand that would liberate them from their problem, but they were both very clear that it was one relatively simple step that could be taken and would make a clear, positive impact on their lives. They could not understand why the Government had not already intervened to introduce a one-stop shop, and were shocked that the Government had whipped against an amendment proposing this change in the Commons.
I find it extraordinary that the Government should introduce what is, in effect, our first Bill specially on online gambling without seizing the opportunity it presents for dealing with the long-term disadvantaging of online problem gamblers. I find it even more extraordinary that the Government should instead use the Bill to make life much more difficult than is already the case for online problem gamblers in the United Kingdom by introducing far-reaching online gambling liberalisation, so that any provider anywhere in the world can now advertise so long as they get a Gambling Commission licence.
Amendment 7 presents your Lordships’ House with the opportunity of ensuring that this, the very first piece of legislation specifically on online gambling, seizes the opportunity to address the historic disadvantage of online problem gamblers. Amendment 7 also provides a means of balancing the online gambling advertising provision in the Bill, which will make life much more difficult for online gamblers, with a provision that would at least provide some assistance. I beg to move.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I support the amendment. Gambling is an extraordinary business, and it is never more so than when otherwise sensible, able people become addicted to it. I was present at the meeting kindly organised by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and I was very moved by the testimony of the two men there who had fallen prey to this addiction. One was a Regular Army officer who was thereafter a senior figure and shareholder in a City business; the other was an engineer who had been a broadcast disc jockey. Listening to those two men—who were being extraordinarily brave, forthright and frank—drove home to me the sheer loneliness and social isolation that goes with the addiction to gambling and what an awful business it is.
I then read Section 1 of the Gambling Act 2005, which is substantially amended by the Bill. This section —in Part 1 of the Act, which is headed “Interpretation of Key Concepts”—under “Principal concepts”, says:
“In this Act a reference to the licensing objectives is a reference to the objectives of”—
the third of which is:
“protecting children and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited by gambling”.
The people we are talking about in this amendment are “other vulnerable persons”, and they are harmed and exploited by gambling and exploited by the companies that run these betting opportunities. They are ruthless in the way that they advertise. They go straight for the jugular. They care not what happens as long as their betting odds come piling in.
Lord Browne of Belmont
My Lords, I am very grateful to everyone who has spoken in this debate and I have listened carefully to what the Minister has had to say. I very much welcome the fact that the Government have moved a long way on one-stop shop self-exclusion since the beginning of the passage of this Bill in another place—from clear opposition in the Commons to commending research in the Lords—and they now talk of making significant progress in the next six months towards creating a one-stop shop self-exclusion mechanism.
I have a number of questions for the Minister. First, can she clarify that it is the clear and deliberate intention of the Government to establish a national self-exclusion scheme for remote gamblers? Can she confirm that it will happen? Secondly, can she provide a little more detail on the timing? In the letter from the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, reference was made to making significant progress in the next six months but there was no reference to when the Government hope that the arrangement might be in place. Finally, can she confirm that the new arrangement will be statutory in the sense that it will be achieved under the Gambling Commission licensing conditions that are upheld by the 2005 Act?
Baroness Jolly
I am sorry. Would the noble Lord mind repeating his third question to me?
Lord Browne of Belmont
Can the Minister confirm that the new arrangement will be statutory in the sense that it will be achieved under the Gambling Commission licensing conditions that are upheld by the 2005 Act?
Baroness Jolly
That was really fast work by those in the Box, for which I thank them. The report is due in May 2014. Having made a decision, we will then need to move as fast as is practically and technically possible, because this is not the sort of thing that we can just turn to in the morning and switch on. We need to decide what we are going to do. That is our intention, if it is practical and possible to do so, and it will form part of the licence conditions.
Lord Browne of Belmont
I am very grateful for the Minster’s reply. Perhaps I may ask just one further question and I do not think that there will be a problem with this. Will the Minister undertake to meet me and online problem gamblers to listen to their stories and to allow their experience to feed through into the development of the one-stop shop?
Baroness Jolly
We need to make a decision when we have seen what the report says. There is no point in having something that is not comprehensive. I have explained that it is part of the Gambling Commission licence so it will therefore be compulsory.
Lord Browne of Belmont
My Lords, on the basis of the Minister’s replies to my questions, I congratulate the Government on the significant steps that they have taken to date. Since the Bill entered the Commons, they have moved forward in relation to self-exclusion and I hope that we will be able to make more progress as time goes on. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.