Alan Alda once said: “Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart”.
Ingenuity may have fuelled the growth of the gambling industry in recent years but wisdom has often been in short supply. As the ICE expo – pantheon of gambling smarts - prepares to hit London, Dan Waugh asks whether now is the time for a return to wisdom.
Looking at the state of gambling in Britain at the start of
2015, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ratio of smart to wise
has moved a little out of whack. Everywhere one looks one is confronted with
problems – many of them the result of industry ingenuity – with no really
workable blueprint for resolving them.
First, we have the ‘known knowns’. Most prominent of these
is the issue of the FOBT and betting shop clustering – a controversy that is
unlikely to go away anytime soon. This is supplemented by a host of other
issues which we can expect to grow in prominence over the course of the year –
TV advertising for (chiefly remote) gambling services; bingo licensing and fears
that Greene King will turn its pubs into gambling dens; the question of how
much (if anything) betting companies should pay to the sports that provide them
with markets; and sports integrity (albeit that is more of an international
than domestic issue).
Then we have the list of ‘known unknowns’, headed by the
question of how the Gambling Commission intends to regulate remote gambling
once it moves beyond the licensing phase and gets its teeth into the specifics
of conduct. Meanwhile, mobile gambling (largely undeveloped at the time of the
Gambling Act), seems destined to become much more than merely a subset of
remote regulation precisely because it has the potential to blur the neat lines
between terrestrial and remote gambling.
To this already long list we should add a couple of latent
issues. First of these is the embarrassing fact that a decade on from the
Gambling Act, ambitions for destination casinos in Britain remain largely
unfulfilled. Genting’s new £200m development at the NEC in Solihull, which
opens later this year, will be the first (and possibly last) venue that would
meet the expectations of those who framed the reformist legislation. It is
perhaps telling that over the last ten years the balance of gambling in Britain
has shifted even further towards convenience and away from destination.
Then there is the matter of so-called ‘social gaming’, which
so far seems to have evaded legislative scrutiny on the view that acquired credits
are not the same as cash. Given the reported spending patterns, the propensity
for customers to lose control of their play and the fears that social games are
‘grooming’ future ‘real-money’ gamblers, it seems likely that regulation of
this activity has been deferred on the basis of complexity rather than
principle. It may just take one of the world’s gambling regulators to show us
the way.
Then there are the ‘macro-issues’ from the European Union –
its fourth anti-money laundering directive and (potentially significant for the
industry’s advocates of ‘Big Data’) the forthcoming data protection directive.
Finally, there are two important questions of responsibility
– who is responsible for the minimisation of gambling-related harm?; and who is
responsible for enforcement of the spirit and the letter of the legislation?
We may have a Responsible Gambling Strategy Board[1]
– but it is difficult to decipher just what this country’s strategy for harm
minimisation is amidst the alphabet soup of competing (and sometimes antagonistic)
organisations and pressure groups.
Meanwhile, the Gambling Commission could be forgiven for
feeling a little unsure of its own mandate following two successful challenges
to its authority in the courts since May last year (Luxury Leisure vs Gambling Commission and Greene King vs Gambling Commission). Under its chief executive,
Jenny Williams the Commission has done a creditable job under trying
circumstances - with little in the way of thanks from any quarter. As Williams
prepares to step down later this year, her successor will need to feel
confident in the parameters of the Commission’s responsibilities.
The sheer breadth of issues have turned gambling regulation
into a game of political ‘whack-a-mole’ - an exhausting and unproductive cycle
of opportunism and controversy.
In the absence of a clear blueprint for gambling in Britain,
proponents and critics of the industry have a tendency to fall back on either
libertarianism or the Gambling Act’s mandatory licensing conditions. This is
facile. Freedom always has its boundaries (and very few gambling companies want
a truly free market) while the mandatory conditions are intended to describe what gambling should not be (unfair,
criminal and predatory) but they do not by themselves provide a vision of what
it should be.
For the sanity of all concerned, now is the time to take
stock. By taking time to distil clearer views on the role of gambling in Britain,
what we want our industry to look like and how gambling might be harnessed to
the interests of the nation, we will become better equipped to develop coherent
solutions to tactical issues. The real ‘FOBT problem’ isn’t about whether the
maximum stake on a betting shop slot should be £2 or a £100; it’s about where
gambling sits within society and what expectations we have of different forms
of gambling.
This will require creating time and space for wise and
independently-minded people to explore the complex issues (economic, societal,
sociological, psychological, political) that surround gambling, to reflect and
to propose a clear way forward. This was the chance given to the industry at
the start of the century, when the British government’s economic big gun, Sir
Alan Budd led a year-long review into gambling and Professor Peter Collins ran
a highly respected multi-disciplinary gambling studies unit at the University
of Salford. In theory at least, gambling policy formation never had it so good.
Since that time, we have had innumerable public
consultations on discrete matters of policy but only one period of reflection –
the disappointing select committee enquiry of 2012 (whose recommendations,
which included increasing the number of FOBTs per betting shop, have been
largely side-lined).
Today, even our academics (with a few notable exceptions
such as the excellent Professor David Forrest of Liverpool University) have
been suckered into trying to prove or disprove theories of harm rather than
engaging in systematic and long-term studies of costs and benefits (which might
then be used to inform policy).
The problem with all of this is that the scars of the
Gambling Bill (and its derailment by the media in the run-up to 2005) run deep.
Mention the possibility of new primary legislation and politicians and
operators alike turn ashen. Insofar as the country at large is concerned,
gambling is sufficiently unimportant for the current unsatisfactory state of
affairs to continue. Matters are only likely to change for the better if those
who care about the industry – operators, researchers and regulators – can
forget about being smart for a while and try to find a little more wisdom.
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