British gambling problem grows amid rise of machines
TONY Franklin entered a betting shop in northwest London one morning this month and paid £300, or around $400, into a gambling machine – and lost that money within 16 minutes.
Then he paid in another £300. Then a further £1,000 six minutes later. And 20 minutes after that, a final £1,000. Within 42 minutes, Franklin had lost £2,600, the latest relapse in a decadeslong gambling addiction that he reckons has cost him over £1 million, his marriage, several jobs and his relationship with his three children.
“I just don’t know why I go in, and this is the problem,” Franklin, 46, said a few hours later.
“You know you’re going to lose.” Franklin has been trying to quit gambling for years. What usually drags him back in is a particular kind of gambling machine, known as a fixed-odds betting terminal, that lies at the heart of a bitter debate about the future of British gambling. Campaigners and some researchers say the machine is an unusually addictive form of gambling that is sucking billions out of Britain’s poorest communities, and some hope it will be banned after a government review next month.
But bookmakers, backed by other researchers, counter that there is no clear evidence that the machine is any more addictive than other kinds of gambling – like the online casino, a product that is restricted in the United States but legal in Britain. They warn that banning the machines, which are found only in British betting shops and provide more than half their profits, would lead to the loss of thousands of jobs.
For campaigners, a set of statistics published in August by the Gambling Commission, which regulates the British gambling industry, highlighted the urgency of the matter: It suggested that the number of British “problem gamblers”, or people whose lives are damaged by their gambling, had risen almost 50 percent between 2012 and 2015, from 280,000 to 430,000.
The bookmakers, though, pointed to a line in the report that said the rate of problem gambling had remained “statistically stable”, because both figures are small compared with the British population as a whole.
The history of fixed-odds betting terminals is under less dispute. They were introduced into British betting shops in 2001, at a time when the government of Tony Blair, then the prime minister, was accelerating the gambling industry’s transformation, as academic David Runciman has argued, from one that was permitted only to meet demand into one allowed to stimulate it.
Today, there are roughly 33,000 such machines spread across Britain’s 9,000 betting shops. They collectively provided a profit of over £1.8 billion last year, far more than those outlets made from bets on horse races, dog races and soccer matches combined.
Roughly half the terminals are supplied by a subsidiary of a company headed by US businessman Ronald Perelman, who is friends with President Donald Trump. The configuration of the machines themselves is unique to Britain, partly because their settings are illegal in some other countries.
The machines allow users to place bets of as much as £100, once every 20 seconds, on computerised casino games such as roulette.
While researchers are divided on the subject, many gambling addicts say the machines’ singular features make them uniquely addictive and uniquely harmful, both accelerating the rate of loss and decreasing the waiting time between bets.
“It’s a gambler’s dream,” said Jason Haddigan, a former addict who wrote about his decades-long addiction in a new book, How and Why I Conned the Bookies. “You get the buzz straightaway, and you get hooked straightaway.”
Bookmakers dispute these claims. There is “no link between gaming machines in betting shops and problem gambling”, said Gary Follis, a spokesman for the Association for British Bookmakers, citing the Gambling Commission’s recent report, which suggested that problem gamblers tend to use several different gambling products.
Bookmakers also argue that the campaign against fixed-odds betting terminals is backed by people who make money from other kinds of gambling, and say that banning the machines would force many shops to close, leading to job losses.
That argument strikes campaigners as myopic, given the social damage they say the machines are causing to some of Britain’s poorest communities.
Figures from the Campaign for Fairer Gambling suggest that there are twice as many such terminals in the country’s 55 most deprived areas as there are in the 115 richest districts (which contain the same population), and more than double the losses.
“Socially, it’s decimating communities,” said Carolyn Harris, a Labour Party lawmaker who heads a parliamentary group that discusses the machines. “The less money you put in these machines, the more disposable income people will have to put into other businesses,” she said, adding that banning them would “boost the economy and create employment”.
Research commissioned by the Campaign for Fairer Gambling in 2015 suggested that for every 5,000 jobs that might be created by the machines, a further 25,000 jobs would be lost.
Campaigners want to ban the terminals – or at the very least to lower the maximum bet to £2. But the betting industry has fought such a successful countercampaign that Parliament has yet to add any new restrictions. (It emerged this month that members of Parliament had accepted a greater amount of gifts and hospitality from Ladbrokes Coral, Britain’s biggest betting company, than from any other source in the past year.)
The government is due to release a long-awaited review of fixed-odds betting terminals in October, and campaigners hope it will recommend increased restrictions on their use.
Yet others, including Franklin, say the government needs to reform not just machine gambling but also the industry as a whole.
The controversial machines “are just one part of a massive problem”, he said. “One part of the cradle-to-grave electronic gambling extraction business that is causing untold unhappiness in this country.”