Gambling target should be football shirt sponsorship
Carolyn Harris has been described to me as “the most capable Labour MP I’ve ever worked with”. So, it is no surprise that she carries cross-party respect in Westminster, particularly when the subject is gambling.
It is deeply worrying when she says: “I just can’t see how the Gambling Commission can continue in its current form. It is unfit for purpose, whether that’s a lack of resources or lack of staffing, I have no idea, but something is wrong and it’s not working. This is not an organisation that needs tweaking; it needs changing completely.”
It is, however, of greater concern that the executives of the commission appear to be trying to save their own skins by threatening to introduce affordability checks on gamblers prior to the completion of the Government’s forthcoming gambling review.
In some sort of utopian world, that might sound like a terrific idea. Once you have passed a threshold of, say, £100 of bets, the bookmaker would be required to ask you for details of your income, your bank balance, your credit card debt and whether you are sleeping with your neighbour. Well, maybe not the last bit, but you get my drift.
But, for two principal reasons, such measures would be detrimental to the best interests of gambling addicts.
First, punters would open accounts with multiple bookmakers to circumnavigate the threshold. That would ensure that even the bookmakers who did not want to exploit addicts would be less able to identify problem gamblers and act to protect them.
Second, those who can afford to gamble more than £100, but do not want to hand over their personal financial data, would bet with unlicensed bookmakers who pay no tax to the Government and no levy to racing.
In the old days, unlicensed bookmakers hung out in dodgy pubs and broke your legs if they thought you had stitched them up with inside information.
These days, they register multiple online betting sites registered in places such as Curacao, a small island off the coast of Venezuela.
The website which assists them to set up boasts that “a Curacao licence is easy to get with little paperwork. The island offers the regulatory benefits of the EU, without being part of the EU or subjected to its high tax rates”. In other words, it is a bit of a fiddle.
These sites are reminiscent of Chinese manufacturing companies inasmuch as they all look and feel the same, but they have different names. And they are very easy to find.
It took me all of five minutes using the Google search engine, and the site accepts various bitcoin currencies, which is presumably very handy if you are laundering “dishonest” money. Not that I am saying that anyone in neighbouring South America would be doing that.
Whether I would ever get paid if I developed a winning habit is hard to say. Presumably, I will not be able to find the operators in a beach bar in Curacao.
If the Gambling Commission bounces the UK into ill-thoughtout affordability checks, it has been estimated that it will wipe £60million a year off the levy yield to racing. That will destroy racing as we know it in this country, and all the jobs it provides.
The irony here is that racing is not one of the big contributors to problem gambling. But that does not mean to say that it does not need the bookmakers it chooses to partner with to do more to reduce any contributory factors. One ruined life is one too many. So, more checks of big, regular losers should be compulsory to protect the vulnerable.
But the real villains when it comes to gambling addiction are the online casino and poker sites. And, boy, have they done well during the lockdowns.
Where do they advertise? On the shirts of our favourite football teams. Why? Because those teams get massive TV exposure and are supported by young men, who are statistically most likely to be gambling addicts. So, if the Gambling Commission wants to make a difference, and salvage its reputation in Westminster before the gambling review is completed, football shirt sponsorship is where it should be aiming its fire.