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Sports Betting

I agree with the logic of the hon. Gentleman's position; however, I refer him back to my opening remarks. Even given those temptations and the fact that such players may be relatively lowly paid compared with their premier league counterparts, we should bear it in mind that such instances are still extremely rare. Just because somebody might receive a sizable reward for doing it does not mean that they will. Most people who take part in sport do so because they are genuinely sporting people and want to do their best for their team, and we should always remember that. Let me turn to the sports levy and why its imposition would be completely wrong. The Government have spent many years—and continue to spend an awful lot of time—trying to get out of a levy on horse racing. It would be entirely bizarre for a Government who want to do that to try to get into a levy on every other sport under the sun. I hope the Minister will make it clear that he totally rejects the idea of a sports levy. The other issue, which relates to the points made by the hon. Members for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) and for Norwich, North, is that a sports levy would make the richer sports even richer. A huge amount of sports betting takes place on premier league football—it is probably the biggest single area of sports betting. Therefore, given that we all agree that the chances of corruption in premier league football are very slim, it seems inevitable that if we imposed a sports levy, the premier league would say, "Hold on a minute: a huge amount of the money being bet on sport is bet on the premier league, so we want that money. It is premier league money, not football money." We would end up with the perverse situation whereby poor betting shop punters in our constituencies would be putting their hands in their pockets to bump up the wages of the likes of John Terry, who is on £125,000 a week. What on earth would be fair about that? It would be a prime example of throwing apples into full orchards.