Betting Emporium

 

 The issue punters have had throughout this process is that the debate has always been presented as being between two sides, the major operators and the gambling reformers, and while some might naturally choose to sympathise with people who genuinely believe that current gambling legislation was passed before we had smart phones, that the operators have been known to prey on vulnerable people in the past and that keeping these massive companies on a tighter lead might be a good thing, sadly that involves siding with plenty of people who simply don't want gambling to exist at all. For a lot of the last twenty-six months it's felt like the less than 1% of gamblers, which might be a good guess of the number who have problems with gambling, are the only ones that matter, and that nobody has cared about the normal, everyday people who enjoy a gamble, like to study the form, follow a sport, think about the outcome and be rewarded if they win. Lots of those people, maybe as many as 85% will lose in any given year, and most of them will think of the "price" of their hobby in the same way they might think about the price they pay to go to the cinema or subscribe to Netflix.

 

 Until today all operators have been asked to make voluntary donations of 0.1% of net revenue and that money has gone to an organisation called GambleAware who were set up to give people information on gambling to make it safer, to pay for support and treatment for people suffering gambling harm and to pay for research into gambling to help reduce harm. The White Paper proposes that there will now be a Statutory Levy, which will probably end up being 1% of net revenue which all operators must pay. The Betting and Gaming Council, who represent the operators, have welcomed this and their members were in agreement that the voluntary payments would go up to 1% even if this was never made compulsory. That's good then...everyone thinks this is a good thing and we can all get on with moaning about something else. Not so fast...

 

 The problems here are that the NHS have stated in the past that they would rather get their money directly from government as the victims of compulsive gambling don't like the idea of the bookmakers paying for their treatment. There isn't any evidence that any victims or their familes ever said that but that's not unusual in these debates. The government have never liked the idea of hypothecated taxes, where you tax people an amount to pay for one specific thing, and there are always arguments about how to best spend the NHS budget which might not rank gambling disorder treatment services as a high priority. The levy and the money that operators are fined will now all go into this one place and if you thought the battle to get the White Paper to appear today was messy then wait until you see what a bunch of organisations arguing over a large new pot of money looks like.

 

 Broadly speaking the debate will be over whether to take a "public health approach" to gambling and once you go down this road it never takes you too long to find someone who genuinely believes that all gambling should be banned and that the aim should always be a reduction in all gambling and not just a reduction in gambling harm. In order to further their plans they need evidence. All politicians are fond of saying that legislation should be based on evidence and the issue in gambling is that many of the studies that have been done, and the evidence that has been produced, show huge bias depending on who has funded it. The Gambling Commission spent £1.4m from licence fees since 2019 on a variety of research projects. They have also spent nearly £16m in the voluntary monies mostly from Entain, Flutter and Bet365, in that time and where that money has all gone is anyone's guess as they haven't updated that part of their website for about a year. It's an extremely safe bet that some of that money has gone to organisations who are openly anti-gambling. Meanwhile the government have sent many millions from the NHS budget to multiple organisations like the Office of Health Improvement and Disparities and the National Institute for Health Research. Huge amounts have been spent on reviews and reports with universities getting large sums to carry out studies. That's before you get into the many think tanks and consulting firms who seem to have large budgets to spend in this area.

 

 Much like the whole debate around the White Paper this debate over who funds research into gambling breaks down into a straight fight between the large operators and people who believe that all gambling is inherently bad. As punters, yet again, we end up taking the side of our old enemy the bookies. The Department of Health and Social Care don't really allow research that is commissioned by gambling operators and so they are bombarded by surveys, reports and papers prepared by people that are anti-gambling, which are often statistically unsound or sometimes simply ridiculous. Many times the questions that are asked are designed to get an answer which was decided in advance and so many of the conclusions are hugely subjective.

 

 People taking a public health approach to gambling will often describe it as "the new tobacco" but I massively take issue with that description. While it is undeniable that every cigarette you smoke has a detrimental effect on your health, whether you have the odd puff or are a forty a day person, gambling is a totally different "product" in that you are paying for an experience in the way you do when you take a holiday, go to the cinema, go to a concert or watch a football match. There is a cost and you don't get a physical product for that cost. While it's true that for certain people gambling can lead to issues with addiction and be extremely damaging, for most people it's a positive benefit in their life. I could easily do research that showed that if people switched their expenditure from cinema going, theatre going, concert going or attending football matches to buying stuff from shops in the high street then that would be better for the UK economy but that research would be deeply flawed as the benefits that people get from the pleasure these experiences can bring are so hard to quantify. If the public health researchers fail to see gambling in that way their conclusions will lean towards abolishing it.

 

 A lot of people would say that this great pile of money that will now be coming in via this new levy should simply go on building new clinics to support and treat people who's lives have been ruined by gambling. It feels like years ago that I read we were going to have fourteen of these around the country, but we seem to be still stuck on maybe six and that means that only the most extreme cases of compulsive behavior can currently be dealt with.

 

 Effectively this levy is a tax that bettors will pay, it has to come from somewhere and the companies may "charge" bettors by offering less concessions and tightening their margins. In the future we might reflect, while reading a poorly researched report with a scary headline and a dubious conclusion, that we paid for it by the removal of a sixth place in our Saturday handicap or the end of the 2-Up on our footie bets.

 

Sadly I will confidently bet the odds-on that most of this massive influx of new money is spent in a way that isn't very clear to the outside world, much of it goes to consultants, think tanks and research institutes and that it ends up producing work that is intended to kill off our hobby and our industry for good.

 

 

Follow Neil on Twitter @SenseiChanning and @bettingemporium