PUBLIC POLICY EXCHANGE SPEECH
20 February 2014
Matthew Hill, Director Gambling Commission
Good morning everyone. My name is Matthew Hill and I am a Director at the Gambling Commission, the body responsible for regulating most commercial gambling in Great Britain, including the National Lottery. We do this in partnership with many other organisations, most importantly local authorities who have the job of managing local gambling provision.
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I’m particularly grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate today becau it comes at what I think is a pivotal moment for gambling and gambling regulation, not only here in Britain but across the globe. There is a change in the wind, I think, in the way people are thinking about gambling regulation in very many jurisdictions across the world. I’m going to spend most of this short talk tting out some i
deas about that change, which I hope will help stimulate the debate on the panel ssions a bit later on. In doing so I’m going to say why I think it is important to get a much better understanding of how and why people gamble and –critically – why some people gamble safely and others come unstuck, sometimes riously and with very sad conquences, as Etta has described.身心疲惫
But let’s start with a quick recap of where gambling fits in to the current public policy framewo rk. The two most important concepts to bear in mind for the purpos of today’s discussions are as follows:
-First, since the late 1990s gambling has been positioned by successive Governments as
a mainstream, mainly adult, leisure activity
-Second, while most people who gamble do so safely most of the time, gambling caus harm, sometimes rious harm. And one does not have to be a gambling addict to
experience harm
-Third – and this is a point that is often lost in discussions like this – gambling is fun.
People who gamble do so generally becau they enjoy it. They make an adult choice to gamble becau they want to. And in an open and free society like ours, that is a
decision they are perfectly entitled to make, provided doing so does not harm
themlves or others.
[To paraphra David Forrest of the University of Salford, gambling benefits a lot of people a little and harms a few people a lot.]
The concepts reflect societal attitudes to gambling – where just over half of us tend to disapprove of gambling but well over half of us think that adults should be free to make adult choices. They are also reflected in our system of gambling regulation: for example, the very first ction of the Gambling Act requires regulators to “aim to permit gambling” subject to reasonable consistency with the three licensing objectives of keeping crime out of gambling, keeping it fair and open and protecting children and vulnerable people.
Anyway that’s the philosophy and I would like to develop it a bit further today, and li nk it to the notion of sustainable development and growth in the gambling industry, and hopefully then return to the main question of why it is important to understand gamblers and how they behave.
So we have gambling positioned as a mainstream leisure activity. And we have a collective, if slight,
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disapproval of gambling as a society. We know it caus harm. But we also know that it caus fun. There are certainly tensions arising from the positions. How should we reconcile it? Is it even capable of reconciliation?
Historically, gambling harm has been managed by prohibition (largely bad on profoundly held moral objections) or through control systems that ek to reduce harm by limiting the amount of gambling –the so called “total consumption model”. The main problem with such systems is that they tend to hit normal leisure gamblers much harder than problem gamblers or tho at risk. And it builds in from the outt an assumption that a successful, that is to say growing gambling industry must be intrinsically bad.
Such a model is likely to be incompatible with a policy framework in which gambling is positioned, as I said earlier, as a mainstream leisure activity. This often caus tension on the part of policy makers and the public more widely. If gambling really sat comfortably as a mainstream leisure activity – like going to the gym or cinema – I would argue that we would not be as concerned about issues like betting shop clustering or increas in TV advertising.
So the total consumption model does n’t help us much in managing gambling harm, becau it fails i
n many cas to provide the protection that problem gamblers need; it constrains, limits or reduces gambling fun; and it gets in the way of growth. So what’s the alternative?
We believe that the way to make gambling regulation work is to shift the focus of the regulation away from the sort of blanket controls that underpin current gambling legislation –like limits on machine stakes and prizes and machine numbers – and tailoring it much more cloly to individual gamblers. The idea is that you bear down hard on gambling-related harm, providing the help and the interventions for the people who really need it, while leaving normal safe gambling as untouched as possible and providing space for the industry to innovate and, yes, grow. That doesn’t mean that it is realistic to expect that all product-bad controls might be replaced by customer-focud ones – we are likely still to need some forms of product-bad controls on harder gambling products in order to adequately protect the young and inexperienced.
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Sounds easy. So what’s stopping us having a system of regulation that really makes an impact on gambling harm, while improving the leisure experience of the majority who gamble safely and is compatible with growth?
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I would say there are three main issues for consideration:
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The first is anonymity. Most land-bad gambling in this country is anonymous. This makes it much harder to distinguish between customers experiencing or at risk of harm and tho who are not, and therefore much harder to intervene. This is a point that many in the industry are beginning to recogni in designing systems to combat, for example, the risk of money laundering, but it is fair to say that it is road that has much distance to be travelled. However, making progress down that road may be easier in a society where loyalty cards are a already a fact of life, where people are becoming more and more comfortable in having an account-bad relationship with the suppliers of goods and rvices, particularly online, and where the u of smartphones and other technologies to pay is already with us, possibly signalling the longer terms decline of cash as a
payment method. Indeed, for tho gambling online, anonymity is already a thing of the past.
-The cond issue is technology, or rather the deployment of technology to help understand and flag tho gamblers who might be experiencing harm. To take the large amounts of data that can now be collected particularly in relation to online or machine play (and with the increasing prevalence of rver-bad machines there is not much difference between them), analy it to look for patterns that might indicate an individual is at risk of harming themlves, and intervening effectively to head off that harm. And as well as intervening to prevent harm, there is real scope to u data to provide g
amblers with feedback on their gambling, to enable them to better manage their own gambling behaviour.
That is why it is so important to understand gamblers and gambling related harm, the subject of today’s conference. Again, there are grounds for optimism – some of the
leading online operators are investing heavily in data analysis and that is starting, we think, to spin off into terrestrial gambling, particularly machine gambling.
-The final, and probably the most important issue, is the industry itlf coming to terms with its responsibility to identify and manage the harm that its products can cau. The future sustainability of the business model may well depend on its ability to do so.
Let me put that another way. Society is much more likely to support a successful and growing gambling industry where that success comes on the back of good money and not bad. By good money I mean money coming from people who are choosing to spend what they can afford to pay, from legitimate sources, for gambling as a leisure activity.
By bad money I mean money that is coming from people who cannot control their
gambling and are therefore not exercising choice, or money derived from criminal
sources or the grey, cash-bad economy.
This is of cour another reason why it is so important to understand gamblers and gambling harm. The two key questions for the industry, in my view, are
o One, “how much of my profit is coming from people who cannot control their gambling, or are otherwi experiencing harm?”梦见手机摔坏了
垃圾狗o And two, “what am I going to do in my business to make sure I don’t take that kind of money?”
Again, there are very encouraging signs that the are questions that the leading business in the gambling ctor are now beginning to grapple with, even if the answers still need more thought. The matters we are discussing and debating today ought to help find tho answers.
ENDS
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