Perchance to dream
It feels like there's been a flurry of activity in parliament of people with an interest in aspects of gambling, as if what was described at the ABB AGM two weeks ago as a war had entered a new, more attritional phase.
The Crausby EDM , I posted yesterday; as I did the report which the ABB published . But in addition to that, Ann McIntosh MP put out a press release about the Offshore Gambling Bill; today, Jim Cunningham MP has tabled a load of questions about stakes and prizes, clustering, and "what evidence the DCMS has received to suggest that electronic gaming machines are addictive"; and yesterday the Labour MP Graham Jones asked a question of Local Communities Minister Eric Pickles. The question was: "The Government talk about localism, but they still set the caps for the licensing of various shops in town centres, including bookmakers and sex shops. Will they consider abolishing those caps and allowing local people and local authorities to set the levels?" The reply: 'That is an interesting and brave request, and I will consider it'.
I suspect that much of this sudden activity is the result of behind-the-scenes action from the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, which, doing a lobbying job at which it has so far proved very adept, will be seeking as many supporters for its position as it can find. My last post on this organisation yielded a number of interesting e-mails from people, some more credible than others. The facts appear to be that it is backed by Derbyshire-based businessman called Derek Webb, who made three donations of £12,500 to the Lib Dems in an 12-month period to September 2012. Whatever his other interests, he is the inventor of a poker-related game called 3 Card poker , for which he has registered a patent, and he sold the assets of his company Prime table games to Galaxy Gaming in Las Vegas in October 2011 in a deal which appears to leave him with some kind of equity stake.
Make of all that what you will. It isn't the obvious CV of someone who believes that gambling per se is wrong, but whatever the motivation, the CFFG's campaign against FOBTs continues apace. From my side, I remain keen that the arguments should stick to numbers that are relevant, rather than ones that aren't. Take this, for example, from the aforementioned Graham Jones's website : "If each of a potential 22 betting shops in Hyndburn had the maximum of 4 terminals, then collectively they have the capacity to take in £1,080,000 per hour." Indeed, Graham: but that would require not just someone to play twice as quickly as the average, but - more importantly - to complete 180 consecutive losing spins, the odds of which are the same as winning the Lottery three weeks on the trot. So, not terribly useful as an argument.
The Gambling Commission commissioned a report which was published earlier this month which examines machine gambling in the Prevalence Study . I have yet to read it all, but from the Executive Summary I can tell you that while 12% of young men (aged 16-34) played slot machines in 1999, only 5% did in 2010; while in contrast the proportion in the same age group playing FOBTs grew from 9% in 2007 to 14% by 2010. People who play FOBTs are wont to do so more often: 35% of those who play do so at least once a week, while with only 21% was this true of slots.
It seems clear from that, then, that they are played more often; but does that make them more addictive, or just more fun? There's the rub, of course: and the answer is different for different types of people. For the vast majority, the greater interaction of this modernised leisure activity provides a better distraction from other daily angsts than its forebear; for a small proportion, they're a disaster.
All the lobbying that takes place around the subject, though, fails to appreciate that this latter category is no more desirable to the bookies than it is to anti-gambling campaigners. With emotive language and statistics so unrepresentative as to be irrelevant to proper debate, they then encourage willing MPs who can use individual case studies to good PR effect to badger the Government into changes which the Government knows make no sense on the basis of the more detailed evidence. The result? An argument, and no progress; when there's plenty of progress that could be made by harnessing some obvious technological solutions, and no real need to argue in order to secure it.