Online Gambling Protection

Ronnie Cowan Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Richard Graham]

My right hon. Friend, who has done a lot of work on this subject, not least through the Centre for Social Justice, is right to highlight some shocking practices that have undoubtedly happened. In my own constituency, a friend of mine who is a taxi driver ran up £650,000 of debt with one gambling firm. I hope that all taxi drivers in Gloucester are well remunerated, but frankly none of them can afford such vast amounts of money. Part of it came from inducements—indeed, there was a lot of wining and dining of such a profitable customer. That is one of the intrinsic slight conflicts of interest within the sector. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for mentioning that.

My first call today is for a serious contribution by the industry to fund vastly improved and independent research. Campaigners have been calling for it, the gambling review supported it and the industry expects it; William Hill has even called for it. I therefore ask the Minister when we can expect to see legislation in the shape of a statutory instrument to implement a levy of 1% of company gross profits as soon as possible.

It is not just research that will help us to prevent the rapid growth of what is fast becoming a social epidemic. As my hon. Friends have said, action is needed to protect the young. That means action on the astonishing amount of online gambling advertising on sports programmes. It is rampant. Fathers watching football or rugby at home and having a flutter with an accumulator on Raheem Sterling scoring a hat trick for Man City are unwittingly starting their children off with the idea that gambling is normal. We need to keep gambling adverts off TV sports programmes.

[Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)]

The difference between gambling and gaming has already been mentioned. Gambling companies seem to be using loot boxes as a pernicious practice to target children who are gaming and get them into the habit of gambling. It normalises the process, effectively grooming children as their next market. We could legislate to close that practice down, as Belgium, the Isle of Man and other places have done.

[Richard Graham]

The hon. Gentleman makes good points. I believe that he is working closely on the issue with my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) in the all-party group. As he points out, such practices are rampant all over the country.

Three big companies—bet365, William Hill and Ladbrokes—have already agreed in principle to a whistle-to-whistle ban during live sports before the watershed, and after it for games that start before 9 pm. That is encouraging, but I believe that we must go further. My second proposal is therefore to ban all gambling advertising during live sport as soon as possible. Perhaps the Minister will confirm the point, but I do not believe that such a ban would need legislation, so I make it an ask of the regulator. I hope that the Gambling Commission’s report, which is due at the end of the month, will include a clear recommendation for such a ban. It could then be implemented by the Advertising Standards Authority, perhaps with some encouragement from the Department.

I would like to go further still. I remember watching many John Player Sunday league games and Benson and Hedges knockout matches when I was a boy cricketer. It never occurred to me at the time that there was something odd about tobacco companies sponsoring sports games while encouraging spectators to smoke, but we later learned the high risk of smokers severely damaging their lives through lung cancer and creating a huge burden for the NHS. Gradually, we all came to understand that tobacco sponsorship of sports was odd and—more importantly—unacceptable, and it was banned in 2002.

The analogy is never identical, but it is relevant. Gambling is no more suitable a partner to sport than smoking, so my question to the House is how long the same journey will take us with gambling. How long will it be before we ban gambling advertising in sports altogether? If the research on the levy shows what I hope it will show, we have a real opportunity to do something about the problem. Thousands of lives are at risk, and we should move fast. I would like to see real consideration given, depending on the evidence, to banning gambling companies from sponsoring sports altogether.

That brings me to other measures to protect vulnerable gamblers—those who are most prone to addiction and least likely to be able to afford it. Like users of fixed-odds betting terminals, many online gamblers simply cannot afford their losses, as colleagues have said. Can we not build on Monzo and Barclaycard’s encouraging start of allowing gamblers to put blocks on their debit cards against payments to gambling companies? The regulator is working well on the issue with financial industry bodies and financial services, and the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute is also playing a part. I encourage those organisations and the Minister to take the policy forward and get all banks to offer it as soon as possible.

Gamblers know that self-exclusion can be got round easily enough—in many cases, a slightly different name will suffice, as one constituent showed me—and once a company has someone’s mobile number or email address, it pumps special offers at them day and night. My next ask is therefore that the Government endorse the Gambling Commission’s initiative to persuade banks and other credit card issuers to disallow gamblers from using their credit cards altogether. It has been put to me that banks would never directly loan money to a gambler, so why do they do so indirectly?

Using blocking technologies such as Gamban can also help. It could be made mandatory for all gambling companies to have such systems, approved by the commission and paid for by the companies themselves. Ultimately, however, I sense that it will be artificial intelligence that provides the real breakthrough in technology—through facial recognition, for example—that enables the sector and companies to block most efficiently and the regulator to do its protection work even more effectively.

That work needs to be part of a strategy that includes the NHS implementing as soon as possible the five pages on gambling in its 10-year review—an important start—and creating more gambling clinics. London and soon Leeds is a start, but it will not be enough on its own.

I hope that all hon. Members agree that there is much to do. I believe that the Gambling Commission’s report will be important; I encourage the Minister to give an oral statement as soon as the report is released, to highlight its recommendations and give the House a chance to debate the issues in more detail. In the meantime, I know that the Government are concerned about the issue and the Minister is committed to it, so I urge them to start the ball rolling as soon as possible with a statutory instrument to introduce a new 1% levy to fund research to give us the facts that we need to make the difficult decisions. I also urge them to move fast on the review’s recommendations, which I hope will include much of what I have suggested today.

Ultimately, online gambling protection is about saving lives. If we can do things that achieve that, our time in this House will have been well spent.