Lottery age limit could be raised from 16 to 18

Yesterday’s decision to lower the maximum stake on gaming machines should be applauded

THE age limit for playing the National Lottery could rise from 16 amid concerns about teenage gambling.

The minimum legal age for gambling is typically 18, but the National Lottery is an exception. The Government will now launch a consultation on whether 16-year-olds should be allowed to play the National Lottery as part of a series of gambling measures.

The maximum stake on fixed-odds betting terminals will be reduced from £100 to £2. Matt Hancock, the Culture Secretary, said electronic casino machines that allow bets of up to £100 every 20 seconds are “a social blight that needs to be tackled”.

There cannot be a sane, responsible person without “skin in the game” who doesn’t welcome the Government’s decision to reduce the maximum stakes on gaming machines in betting shops, sometimes endearingly known as “fruit machines”, from £100 to £2.

When betting shops were licensed in 1960, it cannot have been the intention that they should proliferate in high streets purely as a location for these machines. Certainly no-one had envisaged that they would facilitate players to bet £100 a time at the push of a button; relieving individual gamblers of £1,000 on more than 230,000 occasions a year. The scale at which gaming machines have been vacuuming up punters’ cash has understandably led to them being referred to as “the crack cocaine” of gambling.

It would be naïve to think that people with such a destructive habit won’t now look for other avenues down which to self-destruct. But they will no longer find themselves walking down the street to buy a loaf of bread one minute, only to discover they’re £1,000 down on a roulette machine a few minutes later. The Government has also decreed that “the Gambling Commission will toughen up protections around online gambling including stronger age verification rules and proposals to require operators to set limits on consumers’ spending until affordability checks have been conducted”. In other words, the high street bookmaker should not be restricted while its online rivals are allowed to run amok.

The Secretary of State Matt Hancock and Tracey Crouch, his Minister for Sport and Civil Society, should be applauded for taking a stand. In the face of relentless lobbying by the bookmaking industry, they could have gone for a compromise of £20 a spin; but instead they have gone all out to protect vulnerable people.

Perhaps they need to go further on a promised review into the age limit on people playing National Lottery games, however. Some would say that tempting the less well off with improbable dreams in convenience stores, when they should be spending that money on healthy food for their families, is highly questionable.

It is worth considering, however, whether addiction alone has been fuelling this gaming machine gambling spree; because there may have been another driving force behind the staggering amounts of cash that have been pumped into them. Money laundering.

If you’re the local drug dealer, you can’t take bundles of cash into the bank every morning without questions being asked. But if you have a receipt from a betting shop which shows that you won that cash from a gaming machine, well that’s a different story. They could, of course, do the same thing in casinos; but that involves producing identification documents and circumnavigating the casino’s responsibilities under the Prevention of Crime Act. Not something, presumably, that drug dealers are that keen to do.

There will be collateral damage around this decision. Some bookmakers are predicting that 3,000 betting shops will no longer be profitable and will thus be closed. That is bad news for the people who work in those shops. Horse racing could also be a casualty, as each betting shop is estimated to pay racing £30,000 in exchange for live streaming of races.

But bookmakers are a resilient breed and it is entirely possible that the consequences will not be as calamitous as they have been claiming. If their predictions for racing’s finances come to pass, however, the sport will have to change its relationship with the bookmakers. What it could not do is continue to countenance benefiting from the proceeds of these insidious machines.

One of the bumps in the road that Hancock and Crouch will have had to “ride” is the whinge from the Treasury that £400 million of tax will now evaporate. But it’s inconceivable that the £1.8 billion per annum revenue that the bookmakers apparently derived from these machines will be lost to the economy; it would be an awful lot of money to just stick under your mattress.

Logic demands the money will be spent on something else, which will be taxable. And all will be well at the Treasury; unless, of course, it’s all spent on bitcoin.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion