Gaming Machine (Miscellaneous Amendments and Revocation) Regulations 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-12-18
Topic: Domestic Commerce
David Lawrence Lipsey (Non-Affiliated, Unknown): My Lords, I hope that I can bring a certain expertise on this matter to the debate this evening, not because I was professor of gambling studies at Salford University—although I was—but because I go into betting shops, which is probably not true of many noble Lords here. However, I must say that I have never been even faintly tempted to put £2, let alone £100, into one of these infernal machines I want to use this occasion to draw attention to three lessons that I think should be learned by different people. First, we should understand that Parliament is partly to blame for this. We should never have introduced the £100 limit. It was under a Government I supported at a time when gambling liberalisation ran away with itself. We would not be here tonight, and many people would not have got into great difficulty, had the Government of the time set a more sensible limit The second group of people who ought to learn lessons from this are the bookmakers. I am afraid that I could not disagree more strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Foster, about their lobbying powers. When I came into Parliament 20 years ago, the bookmakers were formidable lobbyists. There were many Members in both Houses whom they were careful to brief very thoroughly with sane arguments. I remember the days of the great Tom Kelly, when he was running the Association of British Bookmakers. He did not use emotional arguments, he used evidence. He put his case strongly and well—and, rightly, we took that into account. This has been a complete shambles by the bookmakers. I spent some time trying to persuade them that they had to take a more flexible approach and find something acceptable to everyone by way of a stake—and I wasted many hours of my time talking to them because of their sheer greed. I understand the greed because, actually, if you go into the figures—I went deep into the accounts of one leading bookmaker—it was true that they were taking a lot of money from the big bets and that a large share of revenue was coming from the big bets, not the small bets. Still, it was unsustainable, as were its effects They should have woken up much earlier—instead of which they went on trying to make as much money as possible for as long as possible and have now found that instead of the half a loaf that they might have had, they have merely a shrivelled, dried-out crust in the shops. We will lose a lot of shops as a result, and some of those who find that an attractive proposition may find, when they look at the high street in a few years’ time, with all the other things that are going on, that those shops which now seem dens of iniquity will stand out as reminders of a more prosperous time on the high streets—but that is just speculation The third thing I must say—here I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Foster—is that the mess the Government got into over what date to apply this from was absolutely tragic. They should have sorted this between themselves: the Chancellor, the Culture Secretary and the Sports Minister. Instead, they went to and fro, looking about as wobbly as any Government could and, in the course of it, we lost one of the greatest Sports Ministers we have ever had. Tracey Crouch was a superb Minister. She was irreplaceable, but we have lost her simply as a result of poor government communications, poor policy-making and poor decision-taking I hope that, while passing these regulations, we will take those lessons to heart.