Gambling: Fixed-odds Betting Machines

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much agree with the noble Lord’s arguments. Indeed, he has put them so well that I am reminded of the advice I was given many years ago that, when all the arguments have been well put, not everyone else has to put the same arguments. I can therefore be much briefer than I would otherwise have been.

As regards the planning side of this, the Government are trying to bolt the stable door after the horse has gone, because we have such a plethora of betting shops with these machines in them that it is very hard to believe that the changes in planning will go any way towards remedying the situation. They might prevent it getting worse but that is all. I am impressed by the overwhelming number of organisations and local authorities—people who know what they are about—that are opposed to the present situation and do not believe that the Government’s proposals go far enough.

Let us take a problem gambler, a person who is pretty well addicted: we know that quite a number of people are. This person goes into a shop and he is told that there is a limit. He responds, “Oh, that’s all right, I understand about the limit. I want to bet £100 every 20 seconds”. That is not going to stop anybody. It might stop a timid soul but not a gambler of that sort. The difficulty is that because of the speed with which it happens there is hardly time for anybody to pause and say, “This is ridiculous. I shouldn’t go on backing the loss of money”. Psychologically, at least if one is somewhere where one can gamble only at intervals, one can reflect on the likelihood of losing or winning and on the need to be cautious. People get caught up psychologically. They lose money and say, “I must go on betting in the hope of getting my money back”. Surely that is the cause. It is a social evil to encourage people to bet in this way and lose money. A lot of the criticism is about how this happens in very deprived areas.

The borough of Newham has put forward some very interesting proposals and briefings on this. It says clearly, “We are a deprived area. We have all these betting shops and machines. Please, we cannot sustain a decent community if this goes on happening”. I do not for the life of me know why the Government are trying to pussyfoot around and make minor changes—and I regard them as minor changes—to placate somebody.

There is an argument that there might be a loss of employment in some bookmakers. Well, there might be, though they are not so well staffed that they have enough people to persuade problem gamblers to ease off. Even if there is a loss of turnover in the bookmakers—and I do not want anyone to lose their job—that money will go somewhere else. People are poor: they will spend it on what everyone else would spend it on in the high street. There will, therefore, be no loss of economic activity because of this. Perhaps there will be a transfer from one type of activity to another, but there will not be an overall loss of economic activity. I cannot see, therefore, that there will be an economic disadvantage. In any case, it is surely not very edifying if our high streets have one betting shop after another. Is that the sort of high street or community that we want? High streets can be positive. They can be useful for people and provide shopping facilities. We do not want these other things when there can be an excess of them—and there is. It is said that a single street in Newham has 18 betting shops. For heaven’s sake, what sort of society are we supposed to be?

There is an enormous weight of opinion against these terminals—or, to put it this way, an enormous weight of opinion saying that the maximum limit should be £2. To me, that seems a lot of money because you can spend £2 every 20 seconds. That is still a lot of money and adequate for one’s gambling instincts, but then I am not a gambler so perhaps I do not understand these things all that well. It just seems that £2 would be a sensible limit. After all, it is right that the people who are vulnerable and who have become addicted to gambling should be given some measure of ability to keep their gambling urges under some form of control. This is not asking for a great deal. We are not asking to nanny people.

Some of the figures we have been given say that over a third of fixed-odds betting terminal gamblers are problem gamblers. It is one in three—a large proportion. People do not just go in there and spend a little money, then go away again. It seems that they stay there and that it is easy for this to become compulsive. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, the numbers of people betting the maximum £100 stake doubles between 10 pm and midnight. That is hardly a time when one’s judgment is going to be calm and sensible.

The weight of evidence is so much against these terminals with the stakes as they are, and so much in favour of having a significantly reduced stake. I believe that the Government’s proposals, which will come out in orders, frankly do nothing significant to help. I urge the Government to think again. We are talking about what is for some people a social evil. It is harm that we are doing to our fellow citizens; surely we have to stop that.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I was for many years a happy constituent of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, in Battersea South but in my many perambulations around the betting shops of the area I very rarely bumped into him, although he was a most assiduous MP. I suspect that like many of the participants in this debate, he probably does not go into them very much.

[Lord Dubs]

Just so that everything should be above board, I go into a betting shop once a year when we have a small bet on the Grand National. The year when I won the most was during an election campaign, when a horse called “Party Politics” won and the odds were good. Beyond that, I do not go into betting shops and never did in Battersea.

[Lord Lipsey]

I will give the noble Lord a tip for next year’s Grand National and tell him which shop to place it in.

We have had a slightly testing afternoon, so I may risk a rather racy analogy which gives my view of FOBTs. I am not very fond of them. If betting on a horse race is the full sexual intercourse of betting and gambling, with foreplay when you select your horse and mounting excitement as the race goes on—we know what happens after that, when the result comes—then FOBTs are a form of onanism. You see sad-eyed blokes—it is always blokes—in front of porn-like machines, made very glittery and unrealistic, shoving in pounds for momentary pleasure. If FOBTs evaporated into the air tomorrow, I for one should be delighted but that does not mean that I would ban them. There are a lot of pastimes that I do not much like: fox hunting, shooting and, although the noble Baroness, Lady Golding, is beside me, I have to say also fishing. However, if others wish to practise them within the law—and of course on fox hunting there is a strict law—that is their affair. Perhaps more importantly, there is the matter of unforeseen consequences.

You do not have to go into a betting shop to place a bet. The online alternative is increasingly attractive, and I cannot see much advantage in forcing determined punters to do what they do in private rather than doing it in a betting shop, where at least there is some element of sociable atmosphere. I can also see some disadvantages. I quite take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, on this: there would be a threat to the jobs of the hard-working staff—some 45,276 of them nationwide—who work in these shops. There would be a loss of tax and the loss of betting levy revenues. Those have to be weighed against the arguments we hear. Having said that—which favours the bookmakers’ arguments—I cannot believe the hash that the bookmakers have made of arguing their case on this. I cannot believe it. They were legendary lobbyists once upon a time. If William Hill or Ladbrokes came through your door, you shivered with fear and slavered to do their will. But now their approach has been that of the tobacco industry at its very worst. First, they denied that there was a problem. Then they said more research was needed—an echo of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in the debate we have just had; there is always more research needed—at the same time doing everything they could to obstruct that research by not making FOBTs available to researchers. Now, finally, their answer is to do more about problem gambling.

Of course, I welcome everything that is done about problem gambling. I applaud the work of the new Senet Group, including on gambling advertising in the windows of shops, but also more widely. I also tremendously welcome the appointment of Martin Cruddace as interim chief executive of the Association of British Bookmakers. Martin is a 21st-century man who has some possibility of helping us find a way through this difficult problem without catastrophic damage either to the betting industry or to the people of this country.

I said that the present answer of the bookmakers is to say, “We are going to fight problem gambling”. Of course I favour that very much, but I do not think it is any more likely to wash than the bookmakers’ previous defensive strategies. There is a lively academic debate about problem gambling. I will not go into it here: “Is there such a thing?”; “Is there a clear distinction between problem gambling and non-problem gambling?”; “How prevalent is it?”. I greatly applaud the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for getting this debate tonight, but the notion that one-third of those who play FOBTs are problem gamblers is not in line with the evidence.

We must do everything we can to stop the terrible affliction that genuine addictive problem gambling can do to people and their families. As far as I am concerned, it is not those who shove every penny they can get hold of into these damned machines who are the only people with a gambling problem. Anyone—anyone—who stuffs a hard-earned £100 into a slot has a gambling problem. You therefore have to tackle it across the board.

What should be done? The title of this debate refers to the growing number of FOBTs. Again, I am afraid that I have to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Clement- Jones, who I much respect. The number of machines is not rising very much. It is nearly 40,000, actually—not the 9,000 he suggested—but it is rising at only about 2% a year. Indeed, I suspect, as we speak, that it has fallen because bookmakers are closing betting shops on quite a large scale now and there will be fewer machines. I give way to the noble Lord.