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Gambling Act 2005 (Operating Licence Conditions) Regulations 2007

My Lords, the noble Lord emphasises the point that concerns me, which is that the instruments should have been taken as an entity to allow them all to be interrelated. However, I shall take the admonition that we should not now refer to the Tote at all. However, let us deal with my concerns on the instruments as they stand. First, I do not believe that they do the job expected of them by the DCMS in this instance. The repeat capacity of the ability of anyone playing a FOBT—a fixed-odds betting terminal—to increase the value of his stake by the repeated pressure of one touch pad has not been addressed by any statement to show how that will be controlled to fulfil what the instrument actually states. Secondly, the statements that have been given in response to the Merits Committee on the control of so-called cartoon racing have not brought them within a clear definition of a FOBT, because there is still no explanation as to how that overcomes the fact that the race itself is separated from the betting medium. That is an outrageous means by which the bookmaker is able to control not only, perhaps, the outcome, but the value of the price returned for any horse deemed to be the winner. I do not accept the assurances given in written answers to the Merits Committee that a process is in place to police that. I would want to see the DCMS insisting upon and obtaining audited information to show that there is a systems audit that demonstrates the fairness of that system. It is not a FOBT, because there will always be a separation of betting from the screen. I cannot accept that there is a weighting of prices derived on the prices being offered from the money being bet on the screen, because I do not see that that is how the betting takes place. That issue is very serious. My final point on these machines concerns the levy, which I hope I will be forgiven for mentioning, because it is an important part of this matter. All of this is part of a progressive downwards pressure on the process of bookmaker profit being taken into account for the calculation of the levy—certainly in response to the Lord Donovan Commission. The Government have let the toothpaste out of the tube regarding the whole area of bookmakers’ control of what goes on in betting shops and this has taken the bookmakers’ claim of an appropriate levy down from the £110 million mark to around £90 million. They have done so by upturning what, over the years, has been a traditional arrangement under which all betting, of whatever type, was included in the levy calculation, including foreign betting. All that is out of the present equation and I believe that, as they reactivate the levy, the Government should be looking to return the levy calculation to the original basis on which it was formed some 20 years ago. Those are important points to which the Government should return.