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Sports Betting

I congratulate the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) on securing this debate. He has raised the issue of integrity in sport on a number of occasions in the House, and I understand his concerns, particularly in relation to gambling. None the less, it would be fair to put the whole issue in context. The hon. Gentleman has raised his concerns about the Norwich game on several occasions because such occurrences are so rare; if this was an everyday occurrence, people would not raise these issues when they happened. The fact that it has been so noteworthy is a tribute to the fact that they are so rare. William Hill told me that in the last year, out of the 20,000 football matches for which it provided odds, only four were deemed suspicious. In horse racing, not one of the 10,000 races was regarded as suspicious. Therefore, we must look at this issue in context. We should bear it in mind, too, that the people who suffer the most from such instances are the bookmakers themselves. When it comes to betting and match fixing, the people who are the victims of any kind of corruption are the bookmakers. At the end of the day, they are the ones who will pay the price. I reject wholeheartedly the idea of imposing a sports levy on bookmakers to deal with the problem. I want to show how such an idea makes no sense whatsoever. Given that it is the bookmakers who suffer when there is corruption, it seems perverse to suggest that they should be the ones who pay. It would be a new concept to make the victim of crime pay. Surely, the person who pays when a crime takes place is the perpetrator. The sporting bodies themselves must take the lead responsibility. If a match is to be fixed in any particular way, the only people who can do it are the players in that match or, perhaps at a push, the officials. The people who are solely responsible for match fixing are those taking part in the game. Surely, the sporting bodies themselves should be responsible for stamping out such a practice because it is the players of those sports who are committing the crime in the first place. The issue comes down to one of risk and reward. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the number of bets on premier league football, and I will return to that matter later. I submit that the chances of corruption and match fixing in premier league football are probably considerably lower than they might be in other divisions of football because the people who play are paid so much. Why on earth would they risk losing their £100,000 a week wages for a relatively small bribe to fix a match? The chances of that happening higher up are much lower. The sporting bodies must ensure that the risk of being caught doing such a thing outweighs any possible reward. That must be the easiest way of preventing the crime in the first place. It is also fair to say that bookmakers and the betting exchanges do more than anyone to help stamp out corruption in sport. They liaise closely with the Gambling Commission and the sporting bodies. It is the bookmakers who flag up suspicious betting patterns, which means that they are doing their fair share. Organisations such as Betfair spend an awful lot of money on integrity departments, which monitor transactions and where things may be going wrong. They are doing more than anybody in that regard. I have asked to visit Betfair's integrity department, and I suggest that other hon. Members do the same to see how much time the organisation spends on the issue.