Gambling Act Review White Paper

Philip Davies Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Frazer]

I thank the hon. Lady and commend her hugely for all her work. As she has highlighted, we have listened and taken action. I really do commend and thank her for her work.

I have been in post for two and a half months. I have brought this proposed legislation forward and she can be reassured that I, together with the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), will continue to ensure that action happens swiftly. As she will know, following a White Paper, various technical consultations need to take place. We will bring forward these measures largely through statutory instruments, and she has my utmost commitment that I will ensure that process is done as speedily as possible.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. How many regular punters did the Secretary of State speak to before bringing forward these proposals, particularly in relation to the affordability checks, including the bizarre and arbitrary figures of £1,000 in a day or £2,000 over 90 days, which amounts to £22 a day by my reckoning?

The Conservative party used to believe in individual freedom and individual responsibility, but that seems to have gone out of the window with these affordability check proposals. Will the Secretary of State tell me who decides whether or not an individual can afford the amount that they are gambling when an affordability check is made? Will it be the Government, the Gambling Commission, the bookmakers or the banks? Do the punters themselves get any say at all about how they spend their own hard-earned money?

[Lucy Frazer]

I thank my hon. Friend for his engagement on this issue. I know that he, like many others, wants to ensure that people—punters—who enjoy a flutter are not prevented from doing so. He asks what engagement we have had. Some 44% of adults gamble, and we have spoken to quite a lot of them. We have had 400 meetings on the issue to ensure we take all perspectives into account.

The White Paper is about balance and ensuring that people can go about their business, doing what they enjoy, without restriction, but at the same time protecting those people who need protection. Most people will not even know that the checks he talks about are happening. They will be frictionless and happen behind the scenes: 80% of people will have to do nothing at all and 20% will have a simple check on whether they have been made bankrupt or have a county court judgment against them. They will not know that that check is taking place. Those sorts of checks take place in a variety of different instances, but they are there to ensure that in the very small percentage of cases where an operator needs to double-check whether somebody might be going down the wrong road, they can do so. I should emphasise that those checks are already taking place; gambling companies already have a responsibility to ensure the protection of those who gamble with them. We are trying to protect to people such as the nurse who spent £245,000 over a few months, when the gambling company knew that she had a salary of £30,000. Those are the sorts of instances that we want to stop with our proposals in the White Paper.