Draft Gaming Machine (Miscellaneous Amendments and Revocation) Regulations 2018

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 General Committees

[Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Ryan. I thank the Minister for her opening remarks.

This is an important day for those of us who want to see meaningful gambling reform in this country. FOBTs have long been the scourge of the high street, but today, due to the work of tireless campaigners, both inside and outside the House, we are poised to reduce the maximum FOBT stake to £2. The reduction will have a real impact on the prevention of problem gambling, so I welcome that decision.

I pay tribute to the people who got us here, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson) and for Swansea East and the charities GambleAware and Gambling with Lives, but it is a shame that it has taken so long. I trust that the strength of feeling shown in the House and the resignation of a Minister of State whom I greatly respected, the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford, will act as a sufficient deterrent to future Secretaries of State who may wish to put industry profits before people’s lives.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

We fully support the draft regulations, but does my hon. Friend agree that it should not have taken the resignation of a good Minister to get us into this position? The Government should have listened to vigorous campaigning by so many colleagues and charities, rather than having to be forced into this scenario.

[Dr Allin-Khan]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point: it should not have taken this long for us to reach this point, nor should it have required such extreme measures as the resignation of a fantastic Minister who will be sadly missed. Nevertheless, the draft regulations are a landmark in gambling reform, and the Government deserve some credit for eventually taking action to protect people from gambling harms. I hope that this is just the beginning.

The Opposition will not hamper the progress of the draft regulations, since they are designed to reduce problem gambling, but we have some areas of concern, which I hope the Minister will address. There is still a great deal that we can do to reduce the number of problem gamblers in the UK and prevent future generations from falling into the same traps. The whistle-to-whistle ban announced this month on gambling adverts in live sport is an encouraging sign that the gambling industry is open to reform, but we must ensure that it is meaningful, that live sport online is properly regulated, and that other media such as radio are not forgotten.

Labour recently published its review of problem gambling and its treatment, which proposes a handful of reforms that the Government could implement to make a very real difference. The levy on gambling operators to fund research, education and treatment should be raised from 0.1% to 1% and should be compulsory. New clinical guidelines should be developed so that problem gamblers can receive the best possible care and treatment, and the NHS’s funding should be increased so that it can provide that care and treatment across the country. Betting on credit cards should be banned, and it should be possible to block certain debit card transactions so that gamblers can be in control of their spending. Problem gambling rips families’ home lives apart. The Barclays mobile banking app is the first high street bank app to feature debit card transaction blocking, but I hope that other banks follow suit.

Those are straightforward steps that the Government could take very quickly, and I sincerely hope they do, but we also need to widen the conversation around gambling reform to ensure that we think about the industry as a whole. We know that the two main centres of gambling activity are high street betting shops and online gambling sites. By reducing FOBT stakes, we have addressed a major problem in high street betting shops, but more needs to be done. We need a conversation about whether we are prepared to accept the clustering of betting shops in areas of high deprivation, where the people who are most vulnerable are also the most targeted by gambling companies.

Preventing problem gambling in shops is crucial, but so is tackling online gambling. The most obvious issue is online gambling advertising, which is effectively not age-restricted and can be found on almost any website. However, there is also the issue of gambling within online games, whether that is betting on skins in Fortnite or betting on horse-racing in Grand Theft Auto. We need to explore the impact that these parts of games have on the minds of the young people who predominantly play them.

This is a day to remember for UK gambling reform, but more importantly it is an opportunity to recognise what is still to be done. We owe it to the people we represent not to stop here.