Financial Risk Checks for Gambling

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

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.

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman has repeated this line that over 400 people a year die of suicide as a result of gambling—a figure that has been discredited many times and with which the Gambling Commission certainly would not align itself. Can he tell us how he has arrived at that figure? What methodology has he gone through? I think that when he does explain it, he will realise that it is a discredited figure.

[Paul Blomfield]

I was happy to take an intervention, in contrast with the hon. Member’s approach earlier, but I was simply citing the figures provided by Public Health England. I respect Public Health England, as I am sure—

[Philip Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Paul Blomfield]

No, I will not.

[Philip Davies]

The figures have been discredited, and it does not accept them any more.

[Paul Blomfield]

I am prepared to accept the figures from an established, respectable national body.

[Philip Davies]

But it does not accept those figures any more.

[Paul Blomfield]

I do not think that this is—

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Order. Let’s not have a private bit. Let’s get on with it.

[Paul Blomfield]

I am very happy to get on with it. The point I was seeking to make is that gambling addiction is a health issue. The NHS will very shortly be opening a gambling harms clinic in my constituency. It will join a network of 15 across the country that are tackling the serious problem of gambling addiction. Hon. Members have asked, “What requires an intervention? What is the difference between gambling and going out and spending £150 on a meal, shopping and other leisure activities?”, butI do not see the NHS treating those activities as a serious health issue, as it does with gambling addiction.

[Matt Hancock]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way? I am a former Health Secretary.

[Paul Blomfield]

I know that the right hon. Member is a former Health Secretary.

[Matt Hancock]

I was the Secretary of State who introduced those gambling clinics.

[Paul Blomfield]

I know.

[Matt Hancock]

There was one beforehand. Will the hon. Gentleman address the question of the extent to which we know that those gambling harms are related to betting on horseracing—as opposed to these games of chance, which are so aggressive and have algorithms designed to promote addiction?

[Paul Blomfield]

I am happy to have taken that intervention, because I was not seeking to make that point. I was recognising the way in which horseracing is being used as a wedge issue to tackle a different problem, as has been echoed by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) and my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). There is a distinction, and we should not let horseracing be used to undermine the affordability checks that are needed in a different context.

The point I was making is that if this is a health issue, we need to have a prevention strategy, just as we do with other health problems. I commend the Government for the prevention strategy that they have developed with the gambling White Paper. Affordability checks are an important part of that strategy, but it is regrettable that the debate around them is generating more heat than light, as it has done today.

I can understand why, beyond racing, the gambling industry is keen to avoid checks. As my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East pointed out, Gambling Commission research using the “Patterns of Play” data confirms that the most profitable 1% of accounts make 70.4% of gross gambling yield. Those are disproportionate profits derived from small numbers of players, who in many cases are gambling much more than they can afford to lose. Those people need to be protected. We know that harm can happen at relatively low levels of spend, so it is important that affordability checks be set low enough to prevent harm.

I understand the fears behind the petition. It is important that we spend time, as other colleagues have done, underlining how unobtrusive checks can be and, I am confident, will be. Affordability checks are nothing new, and contrary to suggestions from the industry, background checks on financial vulnerability could be frictionless, making use of already available data—data that we should remember is already used by the industry itself to monitor accounts and, in some cases, withhold winnings from players to regulate their losses. The data is there, and the industry is willing to use it in one context. Why not in this context, too?

We know that in the case of enhanced checks, only 0.3% of account holders would be expected to provide additional information—I think that point was made earlier. That is a tiny number in relation to the benefit that could be achieved through introducing the checks. The vast majority of checks can be done passively, using information that is in the public domain or required for registering an account. My hon. Friend the Member for Neath made the same point in her speech. It is also important that checks be done by independent, reputable third parties regulated by the FCA. We should bear that in mind, too.

I want to make a brief comment on the black market argument that has started to come up. This is the last refuge of rogues, really. When the tobacco industry had run out of every other argument to stop regulation, it said, “But what about the black market? Don’t do anything to us: it will force people to turn into black market smokers”—and they did not. We saw a successful public health strategy on tobacco. Payday lenders made the same argument when affordability checks were introduced in their sector, and we have not seen a significant movement from payday lenders to black market loan sharks.

Claims about the potential growth of the black market following more stringent regulations have been successfully challenged, including by the Gambling Commission, whose powers to address the issue of illegal sites will be further strengthened by provisions in the Criminal Justice Bill. I understand the difficulties in regulating the online world. We face rogue operators across the online world, but if we are prepared to tackle them in other spheres, why not in online gambling?

Affordability checks will play an important role. They must be set independently rather than by the industry, and set at a level that will protect those who need them most. I recognise that many people enjoy betting safely and without harm, and we can and should ensure that affordability checks are frictionless except in the most extreme circumstances. We cannot lose sight of the fact that affordability checks are about protecting people from harm and ensuring that the gambling industry is regulated in the right way.

I note the points made about things that have already been happening. Those things are happening because the industry knows that change is coming. If the industry had been left to its own devices, we would never have seen those sorts of measures.