In a recent article on Central Lobby entitled “
Betting industry success with age verification” the ABB referenced the
Campaign for Fairer Gambling’s view, as stated on the
Today Programme, that the Gambling Commission does not properly impose conditions on operators for compliance failure, citing the recent 50% failure rate for test purchasing of betting shops and adult gaming centres as an example.
The ABB claims that its members have an 80% compliance rate with age verification and quote an example of where they have reached 100% age verification. Without knowing the sample size of the example (it could have been two shops) the 100% statistic is meaningless and implies that there is also likely to be a 60% example, if the average is 80%.
The licensing objective in the 2005 Gambling Act is the prevention of underage gambling, so the 20% failure rate shows a clear breach of social responsibility. How irrational it is for bookmakers to be proud of such a failure rate, seven years after the enactment of the 2005 Gambling Act.
The Gambling Commission has also been willing to allow the larger corporations to use third–party testers. This process is not transparent or accountable as the results are not publically accessible, and it is known that there is a likely collusion between operators and the third party regarding which shops are going to be tested.
The Commission should be in charge of the testing and raise more funds through increased license fees if they do not have adequate funds to conduct testing, and should then sanction operators who fail.
Whilst the “Think 21” policy has been introduced, the bookmakers are resisting upgrading this to the more logical “Think 25” approach. It is not over-the-counter betting at which the policy is weakly enforced but FOBT gambling, the most addictive form of gambling and the most dangerous gambling activity for young persons.
Achieving close to 100% compliance is easy if all FOBT screens are disabled until the gambler produces age verification at the counter prior to the machine being activated. The screens could be disabled when there are no credits left and if it remains idle for, say, 30 seconds.
As we highlighted in a recent Central Lobby article, the Gambling Commission has not sanctioned bookmakers for failing to prevent money laundering, nor has it mandated more than one member of staff per premises to prevent rising crime,
with police call outs up 8.2% this year.
In another ABB Central Lobby article entitled “Separating reality of the betting industry from the manufactured myth” they “hit out at recent claims that the industry is running wild” and claim the Campaign is “supplying a series of one-sided news articles about betting shops”. However the ABB article does not explain the myth or the wild claims. This one-sided no-news ABB article at least acknowledges that the Campaign is supplying news articles.
Regarding the ABB claiming that we use data in a highly selective way, why was the industry report,
UK Betting Shop 2011-2012 by Gambling Data, excluded from the ABB submission to the DCMS in 2013? Was it because it substantiated that the regular FOBT gambler lost an average of £1,200 that year, and that 70% of FOBT gamblers were from the C2DE demographic?