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Gambling Act (On-course Bookmakers)

I congratulate the hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Devine) on securing this debate and thank him for doing so. He and the hon. Member for Hove (Ms Barlow) clearly laid out the case, so I do not intend to repeat it. As the hon. Gentleman might expect, the only place where I disagreed with him was at the beginning of his speech. The family bookmakers who are faced with the consequence of the 1998 reforms might now be in mind of the Duke of Wellington who, when faced with the Great Reform Act of 1832, said:"““Reform, reform—aren’t things bad enough already?””" We now have to deal with the consequences of changes made in the past 10 years. It is self-evident that we are faced with a substantial injustice, which, as pointed out, is in total estimated to be worth £100 million. Representations have been made to me about this issue, particularly by a classic family-bookmaking firm, Russell White and his son, John. Russell inherited the business from his father, so to my knowledge, at least three generations of people in the business have used the reforms to secure pitches. The value of those pitches is now estimated at £300,000; that is the size of the asset of which they will be deprived. If they seek to trade it now, under current valuations, they have already been deprived of a significant percentage of that amount. The Minister intervened on the hon. Member for Hove to ask for evidence that the pitches were sold for life. If I were a lawyer defending his position in front of the European Court of Human Rights, I would not want to take his brief. As I have said, it is self-evident that there is a right to property and people have a right to enjoy their property, and it is plain that people are being deprived of that through the operation of the Gambling Act 2005. The plain motivation of the Racecourse Association to obtain ownership of £100 million in assets under the operation of the 2005 Act will unfairly and unjustly deprive a group of people of a very significant asset, and that must be addressed. The case has been made extremely clearly by the hon. Members for Livingston and for Hove, and I will not repeat it, but something must be done, and if the Government do not do it, family bookmakers will be forced to take the expensive option of taking their cases to the courts. On the evidence that I have seen, I believe that they will have a clear legal case, because they have been unfairly deprived of their property. We should not be in the business of driving bookmakers down that extremely expensive and hazardous route, where the beneficiaries will be a group of people who are nearly as well respected as bookmakers: a bunch of lawyers. I sincerely hope that the Government can find a solution to the issue.