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Gambling Act (On-course Bookmakers)

I enter this debate as a complete ingénu. I know absolutely nothing about racing. I have never been to a race course and have never placed a bet. I recognise that my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, East and Mexborough (Jeff Ennis) knows a great deal more about this subject than I do, although I note that of the two Yorkshire Members—my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway)—who have contributed so far, one suggested that Yorkshire is a nirvana and the other that it is a damp and miserable place on new year’s eve. A constituent of mine, Martin Davies, came to my constituency surgery a few weeks ago. He is an on-course bookmaker and has invested a considerable amount of his own money, and his own future, in building up a business on the basis of buying pitches. I want to make a very simple speech really. I believe that people bought pitches in good faith from the National Joint Pitch Council, believing that they were doing so in perpetuity—not, I would say, for life, but in perpetuity, which is quite an important distinction, because they believed that they were buying them and would then be able to sell them to another person, who might die a long time after them, but that is completely irrelevant. People believed that they were buying something and that that was their property—an asset that they had bought. I greatly welcome the fact that my hon. Friend the Minister has this new portfolio. I am sure that he will bring great wisdom to it, but I hope that he will take some time in arriving at a decision on this issue. From his earlier intervention, it seems that his argument will be that people did not reasonably believe what I have set out and that they should have understood somehow or other that they were not buying pitches in perpetuity.