Draft Gaming Machine (Miscellaneous Amendments and Revocation) Regulations 2018

Debate between Stephen Timms and Conor McGinn

Monday 17th December 2018 General Committees

[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.

Universal Credit Roll-out

Debate between Stephen Timms and Conor McGinn

Thursday 16th November 2017 Commons Chamber

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

rose—

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

rose—