---

Gambling Act 2005 (Horserace Totalisator Board) Order 2007

There is nothing in these three orders to which one can take exception. The Minister has explained them very well. If the Committee will indulge me, I shall make a few comments not only on the orders but on the background to them. Horseracing in this country is going through a very fraught time. The constituent parts of what we call British horseracing have all faced difficulties. There have been enormous problems in achieving any kind of consensus on how racing should progress, although the horses still race and go around tracks. The racecourse authorities tell us that their main concern is to demystify racing. I have never understood that. It is a perfectly understandable business; horses either go straight or in a circle, with the objective of reaching the winning post. Those who have backed the horse to win or horses to place will receive money; those who have not will lose their money. I knew that at 10 years old, and I do not see why the people in the corporate boxes, who seem to populate most of the racecourses today, cannot understand it either. The main problem with racing is the funding of it. That is the headache which the British Horseracing Authority has now taken on under the capable chairmanship of Mr Paul Roy, an experienced businessman and racecourse owner. We have high expectations of him, and I have no reason to think that we may be disappointed. His main task is to draw the strings together so that the constituent fighting parts of racing channel their efforts to ensure that racing remains at the cultural centre of sporting life in this country. At the moment, the problem is that racing is losing a great deal of support among people who follow it. That does not mean that racecourses are not full of people going racing; it means that they are full of people who entertain. It is more of a day out now, unless one goes to odd meetings at Newmarket or to meetings in July at which the people are mostly professionals. People no longer bet on horses to the extent that they did; they bet on other sporting events. The income has come down, and the levy contribution has gone down accordingly. The Merits Committee made a very interesting observation about something that has puzzled me, although it did not mention virtual reality horseracing, or cartoon horseracing, which concerns me more. Nor did it say whether that attracts levy contributions, which of course it does not. More extraordinary—this overlaps with other orders—is the fact that the income now going to the bottom line of bookmakers from betting shops, which replaces the lost turnover from racing, comes from fixed-odds betting terminals, which is a euphemism for gaming machines. Anyone who cares to put their head inadvisedly into a betting shop of an afternoon will see a pretty sad picture. People who are usually at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale in Britain—unfortunate members of our society—go in, presumably with a fixed amount of cash which they are prepared to lose, and lose it, because if they have a win on the horses, you can be sure as eggs are eggs that they will lose it either on another horserace or on the machines. I have seen that and would advise anyone who is interested in this whole field to spend an afternoon in a leading betting shop. The orders tidy up the new Act so that we achieve the objective of funding racing, which requires us to continue with the Levy Board. Understandably, the Government want to get rid of the Levy Board because they do not want always to have to arbitrate in rows between bookmakers and those who seek to collect from them what is due for enjoying the product on which they make their profits. I am very glad to see that the orders mention the compulsion that there will be for bookmakers ultimately to pay their dues to the Levy Board. That did not exist in the same form previously. I refer to the profits from machines in betting shops. They are there expressly as part of the horseracing industry and were created for that purpose. Incidentally, it was for that reason that the Irish Government decided not to have machines in betting shops. They thought that it was inconsistent with the aims of betting shops to be part of the racing industry and declared that gaming machines were no part of the racing industry. The Irish, as usual, have proved themselves somewhat cleverer than we are on this subject. That is not unusual these days; the Irish are very clever in many fields. Of course, we accept the orders, which seem to cover every aspect, including the Tote sale. That sale is not inevitable. I shall believe it when I see it. We have the deadline for the ending of the Tote under the legislation because the competition authorities in this country deemed it right and proper that we should end the Tote monopoly, although every other racing regime in the civilised world has a Tote monopoly. It is a strange anomaly of modern life in Britain that we should have taken that view. It will be very interesting to see how the Tote ends up. That is another wool-over-the-eyes aspect of racing in Britain. I have to explain to people the whole time what a betting exchange is, and I have become very adept at it. I do not know how the parliamentary draftsmen would deal with businesses connected with betting exchanges because even these quite simple things are expressed in language which is not particularly easy to understand. I can explain what a betting exchange and a totalisator pool are, but most people out in the streets do not really know the difference between a fixed-odds pool and a totalisator pool. We talk about selling the Tote but we are in fact selling betting shops—the major component of the value, which is about £400 million. The Tote is, in fact, a bookmaker; it is not a Tote operator except as a marginal exercise. Most of its bottom-line profit comes from its activities as a high street bookmaker. That, again, is part of the obfuscation which surrounds racing in this country, which is unusual. In neighbouring countries such as France policemen deal with the crime that may spring from gambling connected with horseracing and pass over the business of running racing to a highly controlled body. I am sorry to go on for so long but I wanted to get that off my chest as I do not often have the opportunity to do so.