William Hill revealed what goes on under its “bonnet” last week in an article on PoliticsHome’s Central Lobby. As many car owners will know, what goes on under the bonnet of a vehicle is often a complete mystery until something goes wrong and you call the experts in.
Over the last two years all bookmakers, including William Hill, have had to call the experts in to strengthen their compliance and security departments. This includes implementing new player protection measures, training staff on how to identify and interact with problem gamblers, introducing
conflict management trainingand overhauling
money launderingcontrol procedures.
As William Hill revealed when it lifted the “bonnet” last week, the bookmaker is now calling in the experts and doing what appears to be its utmost in all these areas and more. However, a peek under the “bonnet” doesn’t reveal the underlying problem that necessitates all this. Like engine trouble, the problem has been building for some time and for the bookmakers, that problem is FOBTs. William Hill didn’t appear to recognise this in its article.
Citing 3,500 responsible gambling interactions and 500 self-exclusions per month is not a benchmark of responsibility. Much of the work around this is carried out by
already under pressureshop workers - and these figures do not reveal the gambling product driving them. Speak to any
William Hill workerand they will tell you that the product is FOBTs. Last year the Gambling Commission reported 22,485 voluntary exclusions from betting shops, up from 11,424 in 2008. How many betting shop managers would say these are because of FOBTs?
Money laundering on FOBTs has been happening since 2003. The bookmakers should take no pride in the fact that they were only
caught out in 2013and have since had to tighten their approach to money laundering controls. Hills refer to “anti-fraud software” as a deterrent. The same type of anti-fraud software did not help Coral to prevent
£900,000 of money launderingacross its shops in the North East.
In William Hill’s article, the reduction in robberies is cited as a success. This is true, but the backdrop to this decline was an industry-wide acceptance that cash handling procedures and systems needed updating. Installing time delay safes, rigorous banking procedures and other standard retail measures have now been incorporated across the bookmaking sector. But the decline in robberies over the last decade has been accompanied by an
increase in police callouts to crimerelated to gambling activity in betting shops. Ask any betting shop manager what is the driver behind this and they will tell you it is FOBTs.
Hill’s describes the debate around “gaming machines” as “unsophisticated” because people do not understand the “complexities that surround the issue of problem gambling.” It is only now after 12 years of FOBT proliferation that the bookmakers are trying to understand the complexities of the problems they have created for themselves and communities because of the UK’s
most addictive and problematic gambling product.
Yet again, the threat of shop closures and job losses is among the final warnings from under the “bonnet”; a warning to government that interfering with FOBT stakes or further regulatory clampdowns will cost jobs. Our campaign has never denied there would be shop closures as a result of a £2 cap, but economic consultants NERA, which also looked under the bookmakers “bonnet” did not agree on the scale of the problem.
Its analysisfound that the bookies were exaggerating when it came to the potential impact of a stake reduction, concluding that an average of around one betting shop per parliamentary constituency would be at risk.
A nationwide survey of betting shop customers soon to be published has revealed that three quarters have witnessed acts of violence or vandalism toward FOBTs, four out of five see the machines and their content as addictive and one in three FOBT players has got into financial difficulty as a consequence of losses – borrowing money as a result. Does the sense of “belonging to a community” that Hill wants to engender include these customers?