Draft Gaming Machine (Miscellaneous Amendments and Revocation) Regulations 2018

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 General Committees

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I am very pleased to be serving under your chairmanship this evening, Ms Ryan, I think for the first time. Rarely will a statutory instrument have elicited the joy that this one will. It represents success at last for a long, hard-fought campaign. We should have succeeded years ago, and would have done were it not for the fact that the Treasury were profiting from the shameful racket to which the statutory instrument will finally put an end.

It is right, as others have said, that we give credit where it is due. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East has led the campaign as chair of the all-party parliamentary group with a unique blend of passion and warmth, and we are greatly in her debt. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting pointed out, has played an exemplary and crucial part as well.

Like others, I pay tribute to the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford, who was absolutely right to resign last month when the Government tried, shamefully, to delay this change, and to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green—with whom I disagree about virtually everything—who has played a positive role in this campaign.

I also pay tribute to local authorities outside of the House. My local authority, Newham, has provided valuable support to the all-party parliamentary group on fixed odds betting terminals—the one local authority to do so. I pay tribute to the current Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz, and to her long-serving predecessor, Sir Robin Wales. I also pay tribute to Christian Action Research and Education, which has been a consistent supporter, with Newham Council, of the APPG.

Unfortunately, the role of some others has been lamentable. Some in the House have lobbied for the continuation of this shameful racket, which has destroyed the wellbeing of so many families. The Chancellor of the Exchequer should be ashamed of himself for apparently caving in to the lobbying. The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport also behaved lamentably in failing to support his Minister, who was forced to resign,.

Ministers missed the chance to act on the growing menace of FOBTs five years ago, in the 2013 triennial review. Five years ago next month, we had a debate in the Chamber, which made the scale of the menace crystal clear. I reported in my speech—my constituency has a lot in common with that of the—that at that time in East Ham, on High Street North we had 14 betting shops open from 7.30 am to 10 pm, each with just one member of staff.

I quoted a former Paddy Power manager, who told me of families and businesses ruined while he was managing a shop, and of students who gambled away their student loans. He estimated that on a typical day in any Paddy Power shop with four fixed odds betting terminals, as they all have, one could meet half a dozen people whose lives had been destroyed by their addiction to these vile machines. A big use of the terminals has been to launder the proceeds of drug crime, giving criminals an apparently legitimate source for their cash. They are in those shops day in and day out.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is right to say that it is not just a case of lives ruined; in some cases lives are lost, because of the amount of suicides. That needs to go on the record as well.

[Stephen Timms]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. A fair number of people, I am afraid, literally have blood on their hands through what has happened.

Often, punters losing huge sums would smash up terminals in the shop in anger, but the one member of staff there was instructed not to call the police, so that the incident would not feature in the crime statistics. Some of the shops act as honey pots for drunken louts intimidating decent shoppers who pass by. We were warned in the course of this campaign that if it succeeded in reducing the maximum stake to £2, the danger was that the number of betting shops could be halved. I must say, if the number of betting shops in East Ham falls by only 50%, I shall be very disappointed. I hope we will see a much larger reduction than that.

These vile machines have been cynically fostered by shameless, irresponsible conglomerates in the poorest communities, as the hon. Member for Glasgow East has rightly pointed out, destroying hard-working families and, on occasions, lives—the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire is right about that. They are a magnet for crime. They launder the proceeds of crime. They are a tawdry and soulless presence on high streets such as the one I represent, driving decent shops away and repelling family shoppers.

How can it have taken five years from the time of that debate, which made the extent of the damage so clear, to bring about this statutory instrument? So much money has been made by the betting companies that they have been able to employ armies of unscrupulous lobbyists and lawyers, and—let us be honest—sold-out former police officers, to give evidence for them from time to time. Of course, the Treasury has been among the principal beneficiaries of this vile trade.

Having spread blame around the place, I want to recognise that—unwittingly, at the time—I bear some personal responsibility for what has happened. From 1999 to 2001, I was the Treasury Minister responsible for betting duty. I introduced a series of reforms to betting duty designed to recognise the fact that gambling was moving online. Indeed, there was a real worry, which to some extent has been fulfilled but not as far as it might have been, that the online betting companies were also going to move offshore.

With the reform package that we introduced, part of its aim was to make low-margin betting products viable. I did not know then about fixed odds betting terminals, but I remember asking industry representatives—I particularly recall a conversation with somebody from Ladbrokes—whether the industry would use this change and behave responsibly. Looking me in the eye, that individual assured me that it would.

Rarely have I been so badly misled. The industry has been utterly irresponsible in the way that it has behaved with these terminals. The vast sums that it has raked in have completely blinded people to the ruin that it has caused. The Association of British Bookmakers, with which I worked in that period at the Treasury, has behaved shamefully, and industry leaders, who comport themselves as respectable businessmen, should hang their heads in shame for the lives they have destroyed in their pursuit of profit.

The Minister said that only those showing social responsibility would be able to take part in this industry. The industry has shown zero social responsibility; it has not even shown morality, let alone social responsibility. Let nobody try to pretend otherwise, because I am afraid that nobody involved in this vile trade knows anything of social responsibility. They have been completely blinded by the enormous sums they have been able to make.

I am absolutely delighted that we have finally got the chance to vote for this statutory instrument, but let us never forget the lessons that must be learned from this sorry and shameful saga.

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Ms Ryan, to serve under your chairmanship for the first time.

I rise to speak as the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on racing and bloodstock industries; I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests in that regard.

I pay tribute to the speeches that we have heard, particularly those from the Front Bench, including that of my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting. Her work on this issue, along with that of my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East, has shone an important light on various aspects of the gambling industry that Parliament needs to look at. However, I am afraid that I want to raise some issues, primarily in relation to racing and the impact that these changes could have on it.

First, I will say very clearly that problem gambling is a curse. It is one of the worst afflictions I have seen, not only as a Member of Parliament in the cases of my own constituents, but personally, with friends and family, from the community I live in now in St Helens to the community that I come from, in Northern Ireland.

We need to focus very strongly on treating the addiction and while I welcome any moves to tackle problem gambling, all I would say about fixed odds betting terminals is that, first, as a punter I do not like them, I have never played them and I cannot see the attraction at all for anyone. However, we need to be careful in this victory lap of virtue— not to be too flippant about it—that we do not see this change as the panacea to all of the ills.

Although I think that a stake reduction was inevitable due to both public pressure and the comparison with other machines in places such as arcades and casinos, I will just note that the Gambling Commission itself said the stake should be reduced to £30, and I wonder whether the Minister would explain why she felt it necessary to reduce the stake further to £2.

Let me say something about gambling, I have a love-hate relationship with the bookies: I love taking money off them, and I hate losing to them. That is the adversarial nature of being a punter and enjoying a bet on the football or the horses on a Saturday, or occasionally—and I hope that Mrs McGinn is not viewing this—taking an hour on a Friday afternoon before or after a surgery to nip into the bookies and watch the racing on the high street.

I have huge respect for my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham and the work he has done. I fear that, while we have a shared Christian faith, my Irish Catholicism is coming out in my contribution to the debate, as his evangelical Protestantism comes out in his. I would just say to him gently that he needs to be careful when he talks about decency—decent shoppers and decent people. The single mum who does a few hours part time to supplement her income, by working in a bookies in Newton-le-Willows, where I live, is far from indecent. The older men who have been widowed, who go into the bookies of a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, and sit and pick their horses out and drink their cup of coffee—and who are there, during the winter, for the heat—are far from indecent.

[Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the generous tone in which he expresses his criticism, but can I ask him about a comment that a constituent of mine put to me—someone who does a lot of gambling on horses? He said to me that he found it impossible in a lot of those shops to get a bet on a horse because the businesses are so completely taken over by these appalling machines. Horse betting is not going on there at all.

[Conor McGinn]

I have no reason to disbelieve my right hon. Friend’s constituent. All I would say is that in my constituency, in the bookies I go into, the machines are not played that often. I am not naive about it, and I am certainly not going to pretend that machines are not a problem, but we have heard contributions from London and from Glasgow and I think that the problem could be more prevalent in cities, where there is non-traditional gambling. I have Haydock Park racecourse in my constituency—and St Helens rugby league club. There are Liverpool and Everton, and Manchester City and Manchester United, and traditional modes of gambling. One of my concerns is that I want people to gamble on horse-racing and not what I would see as the competitor products.

Gambling on the high street is just 20% of gambling overall. As others have pointed out, we need to think about other arenas and the move away from the high street. I contend that the high street may be a safer environment for gambling because it means being with other people, including staff, in an open environment, rather than gambling online, alone at home. It is worth noting—and it will become apparent why this is important for racing—that the number of betting shops on the high street has fallen by 150 in the past six months, and there are fewer of them on the high street than at any time since the 1970s. It is interesting to think that at that time there were only the dogs, horses and football to gamble on.