The dominant gambling debate in Parliament over the last 12 months has been about FOBTs, with a cross party chorus of disapproval against them. Yet William Hill and its competitors still don’t get the message and continue to publish non-evidence based opinion.
Writing on Central Lobby, William Hill refers back to the legalisation of betting shops in the 1960s and the acceptance that gambling is better when licensed and regulated. The Campaign completely agrees, but William Hill fails to point out the differentiation that developed between how and where certain forms of gambling should take place. This includes a variation of regulatory controls governing each venue based on hard and soft gambling – gaming in casinos, machine gambling in adult gaming arcades, bingo in bingo halls and betting in betting shops.
When the bookmakers introduced FOBTs into their shops, bringing in hard casino gaming on gambling machines, initially with stakes over 100 times higher than those in other venues. This brought hard gambling into what was essentially an easily-accessible soft gambling venue.
Despite the ongoing backlash against FOBTs in betting shops, today they still operate at £100 per spin. This is in comparison to the £2 maximum stake found in all other gambling venues, with a £5 maximum in casinos. The Campaign has
amassed and presented multiple pieces of evidenceover the last two years, both empirical and anecdotal, about the harm caused and problems created by FOBTs.
Evidence showing that FOBTs where “
the only gambling type that remained significantly and positively associated with disordered gambling” is just one item that William Hill seems to have overlooked.
William Hill’s Central Lobby article also points to the trading hours of betting shops in Northern Ireland and the closure of shops in secondary locations across the UK. It attributes this to a rise in illegal gambling, although again there is no evidence presented to support this claim..
In Northern Ireland FOBTs were not rolled out due to the area’s high rates of problem gambling. Unlike their UK counterparts, betting shops in Northern Ireland trade around their core business of betting. Over here, William Hill have pushed for quantity over quality horse racing coverage. The Campaign believes this is in order to trade excessive hours in pursuit of their core product, FOBTs, often resulting in
members of staff having to lone work.
At the same time, all the large bookmaking chains, including William Hill, are restricting and banning enthusiastic horse racing punters who outperform their budgeted margin requirements. Over
1,000 of these disgruntled punters have a message for the bookmakers!
It is correct that there is illegal poker being conducted, but this is because there was a genuine pre-existing demand for poker that was not catered for adequately under the 2005 Gambling Act. There was no corporate interest pushing to allow poker outside casinos – unlike the corporate interest that lobbied to see FOBTs flagged through.
The bookmakers’ recent flurry of activity around “harm minimisation” measures on FOBTs, which the government is NOT applying to all other gaming machines, provides another non-evidence based defence of a product that they still insist does not cause harm.
The facts behind these measures are not raised in William Hill’s Central Lobby piece. There were four million sessions in the first week, with under 11,000 persons voluntarily self-restricting. By week 15 only 1,500 sessions did so out of four million. That’s evidence of it having very minimal effect! The Gambling Commission, to its credit, is at least calling for mandatory spend and time restrictions. We look forward to William Hill’s reaction to that.
Evidence that these measures, along with the newly formed Senet Group, will “promote responsible gambling” is yet to be seen, with the bookmakers having the highest self-exclusion breach rate at 74% and no other bookmakers or sectors showing any positive support for William Hill, Ladbrokes, Coral and Paddy Power or their
new watchdog.
William Hill is happy with the current status quo around FOBTs, maintaining their monopoly on an addictive product that now dwarfs all other sources of gambling industry revenue. They know that the average FOBT regular player lost over £1,200 in their shops in 2010, versus £427
for those gambling on what should be the core product, betting.
They also know that the FOBT demographic is two thirds under the age of 35 and that 70% are in the C2DE socio economic groups. None of this information was disclosed in the ABB evidence submitted to the Triennial Review of gaming machine stakes and prizes in 2013.
When it comes to “fact free” debate, William Hill and its team lead the way. But the debate in Parliament is led by evidence and public opinion – which its members must listen to.