Last week the
ABB’s major gambling operators announced a number of major measures which demonstrate that they are listening to public concern and taking decisive action. These measures include:
• a voluntary end to the advertising of sign-up offers on TV before the 9pm ‘watershed’, mindful of children and young people watching
• a voluntary ban on the advertising of gaming machines (fixed-odds betting terminals, or FOBTs) in shop windows
• a commitment that 20 per cent of shop window advertising will carry responsible gambling messages.
• the launch of a major new responsible gambling advertising campaign
• the creation of a new independent watchdog, the Senet Group, headed by an independent Standards Commissioner to hold the industry to account.
While the moves were welcomed by Government, the Gambling Commission and the Labour party, there are still a few critics who continue to insist that betting shops, and in particular gaming machines, are a major problem which needs to be addressed.
For example, an article in the Evening Standard this week claimed that gaming machines, sometimes referred to as FOBTs, are the cause of fights, drunkenness and money-laundering.
One of the assumptions erroneously being made here is that betting shops are a major cause of crime. The reality is that betting shops in the UK have among the lowest levels of crime in all High Street retailers – a fact coming from official police figures from the past 12 months.
Statistics compiled by the
Association of British Bookmakers(
ABB) from Freedom of Information requests to every police force in the country puts the betting shops on a par with fast-food outlets and with far fewer incidents of crime than food stores, clothes shops or pubs.
More than half the forces responded with the information showing the following crime stats:
• Fast food outlets 2,163
• Betting Shops 2,269
• Clothes shops 6,226
• Pubs 18,989
• Convenience/food stores 59,431
On wider issues relating to crime on the high street, we want all our staff and customers to be safe and we have put in place measures to do help this. At the
ABB, we are proud of the success of the Safe Bet Alliance, a voluntary security code of practice drawn up in 2010 in close consultation with the Community Union, Metropolitan Police, the Institute of Conflict Management, Crimestoppers. and the DWP. The Safe Bet Alliance (SBA) document –
www.abb.uk.com/sba-2/- sets out a series of guidelines to help prevent crime and convict those them commit them.
The SBA has won national recognition, winning a Home Office Tilley Award and it has now received the endorsement of the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Another myth is that bookmakers are a ‘magnet’ for money laundering. The official statistics released by the National Crime Agency show that the number of instances of money laundering in our betting shops account for less than 0.34% of all cases reported to them in the UK (around 300,000 in all sectors in 2013).
Regardless, the industry has adhered to UK laws on money laundering and had a stringent anti-money laundering code in place since 2007 and all our major operators employ specialist anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing specialists.
There are also critics who say that customers put £55 on average into gaming machines. This is a misleading statistic. This appears to suggest players lose this amount. The actual average mean spend is less than £10 per session.
Anyone with a passing interest in the subject knows problem gambling is not caused by a single product. Problem gambling is about the person, so removing or imposing bans on machines will do nothing to reduce problem gambling levels.
The silver bullet is education, treatment and research, which the gambling industry invests millions in.
That investment is clearly having an effect, because problem gambling levels are falling. The latest English Health Survey illustrates that 0.6% of players are problem gamblers, down from 0.9% in 2010.