Thursday 17 May 2018

FOBTs stopped

You may have noticed that the government announced that it is going to make regulate fixed-odds betting terminals into the dust today. I put out a comment on behalf of the IEA, saying...

“Today’s announcement shows that you can get anything banned in this country if you whine for long enough. Make no mistake, reducing the stake to £2 amounts to a ban. The machines will be taken out of bookmakers and players will move online where are no limits on stakes or prizes. Hundreds of bookmakers will close, thousands of jobs will be lost and the horse-racing industry will lose millions of pounds in subsidies. Taxpayers will then have to fork out £400 million to fill the gap in the treasury’s balance sheet.

“For what? To deal with a moral panic over something that accounts for just 14 per cent of Britain’s gambling expenditure. There has never been any evidence to support this campaign. The government is weak and cowardly to have given into it.”

And I've written a piece for Spiked about it so do have a read.




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