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Gambling: Casino Advisory Panel Report

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for raising this issue. This gives me the opportunity to correct a slight slip that I made a moment ago. Local authorities organise the bids for super-casinos in their areas, but the decisions to create casinos under the 1968 Act are taken by local licensing magistrates, not by local authorities, and I apologise for that slip. The noble Baroness mentioned the Gambling Act 2005. The motivation behind that Act was not to create casinos—the casinos are a by-product of that Act—but the fact that our gambling laws dated from 1968 and were woefully misplaced to deal with modern gambling, not least the development of online gambling, which presents a real challenge for regulating authorities. The development of new forms of gambling meant that we had to address the fact that the 1968 Act was out of date. That was the principle behind the Gambling Act, which was also the background to decisions about the casinos, as the noble Baroness rightly recognised. Concern was expressed throughout our consideration of that Act that the nation should balance the obvious increase in the participation in gambling of our fellow citizens who, with increased disposable income, are both entitled and in many cases expected to use that income for gambling, from which they derive a great deal of innocent and proper pleasure, against the necessity of dealing with problem gambling and addiction, in particular the impact on children. The Gambling Act sets out to reach that balance. It was the result of very considerable deliberations in the other place and this House. We think that we have reached the right balance.