Before the end of this year, the Responsible Gambling Trust (RGT) will publish its
researchinto category B2 gaming machines, or, as everybody else now knows them, FOBTs (Fixed Odds Betting Terminals). This research does not ask questions around the £100 staking capacity, but instead asks “can we distinguish between harmful and non-harmful gaming machine play?” and if so “what measures might limit harmful play without impacting on those who do not exhibit harmful behaviours?” Professor David Runciman (University of Cambridge) argues that this approach serves the industry’s interests and notes evidence that the industry has manoeuvred the debate using “classic” addiction industry tactics.
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A Pound Here, a Pound There” explores the history of gambling in Britain, narrating its development from an age of government repression to today’s liberalisation and abdication of responsibility by politicians. When it comes to problem gambling research like the RGT’s, Professor Runciman says: “Every official report on gambling in Britain over the past hundred years has insisted on the need for more research.”
Since 2008, when research into FOBTs was first mooted, the bookmakers have banked £6.5bn from their £100 spin FOBTs. Campaign statistics referenced in the article show this has
largely come from more deprived areas. Six years later and we stand a couple of months away from hearing the answers to those questions. Unfortunately the bookmakers already know the answers, because they helped to frame the questions.
Professor Runciman notes, from the evidence submitted by industry executives to the 2012 DCMS select committee hearing A Bet worth taking: “The gambling industry followed the classic pattern for the addiction industries”. The pattern is as follows:
1. Why let the minority of irresponsible addicts spoil it for everyone else
2. Insist that more research needs to be done and the industry will fund it
3. If there is work to be done in protecting consumers, that work is best undertaken by the industry
At that hearing, Dirk Vennix, CEO of the Association of British Bookmakers (ABB), said:
“We think we are best placed, given our understanding of consumer demand…to make the right decisions.” In November 2013
NatCencontradicted that when they published a scoping study looking at what data and knowledge the betting industry held on their FOBT players. It concluded: “It provides insight only into a very narrow range of issues – namely those of financial transactions”. The ABB’s members’ knowledge of consumer demand on FOBTs was actually limited to how much they made from each machine!
Yet in 2013 the ABB rolled out their “world leading” Code of Conduct which includes harm minimisation measures on FOBTs and training staff to intervene in problematic gambling, no doubt because they are “best placed” to understand FOBT consumer demand. This code, just as the code of practice did in 2004; forms strand three of the bookmakers “classic” strategy – the industry knows best.
Leading this “classic” strategy is a betting industry veteran (Ex Coral CEO, ex ABB Chairman) who is also currently in prime position as
Chairman of the RGT. Behind the scenes, as Professor Runciman notes, the bookmakers often hire the same PR and lobbying companies used by the tobacco and alcohol industries. But it doesn’t stop at the bookmakers. Even the RGT has appointed the
tobacco industry lobbyingspecialists Bell Pottinger to represent them.
So will we get the answers we need on FOBTs and whether £100 spin gaming machines on high streets are safe? Not based on the questions the industry funded and influenced RGT is asking. As Professor Runciman says: “The gambling industry has an incentive to keep any research open ended, because so long as nothing is settled there is always a reason for delaying a decision.”
So far the bookmakers have managed to dissuade action on FOBTs for 12 years using their “classic” strategy and the government “has acquiesced in the idea that its regulatory role absolves it of all responsibility to take a stand.”
So we are left with a government afraid to take the hard decisions needed, a bookmaking sector using classic addiction industry tactics and a research body in the grip of industry control. As Professor Runciman says in his closing comment “doubt is the currency in which these people are trading.”