Joint Committee on the Draft Gambling Bill Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1580 - 1599)

TUESDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2004

MR ANDREW BROWN, MR JIM ROTHWELL, MR CHRISTOPHER GRAHAM AND MR ROGER WISBEY

  Q1580  Mr Brown: Even in the existing code there is a reference to betting and gaming: "Marketing communication should not be directed at people under 18 through the selection of media, style of presentation, content or context in which they appear. No medium should be used to advertise betting and gaming if more than 25 per cent of its audience is under 18 years of age. People shown in gambling should not be, nor should they look, under the age of 25". All one is doing is making such communication less relevant to a young audience. They are very similar rules to the alcohol rules.

  Mr Rothwell: Also, the paragraph you picked up on relates to the difference in relation to National Lottery products where the legal age is 16 to purchase the product, that is the only reason why we made that differentiation between children and young persons, if that was where you were coming from.

  Mr Brown: Bingo is 18 and Lotto 16.

  Q1581  Lord Mancroft: How much do you think the existing restrictions on advertising of gambling products have influenced or in any way restricted the prevalence of problem gambling in the UK, or is that outside your area?

  Mr Brown: I think it is largely outside the area. There has been very little advertising for anything that relates to problem gambling. The gambling areas that have been allowed have really been that of Pools and Bingo.

  Q1582  Lord Mancroft: That is now changing.

  Mr Brown: That is now changing.

  Q1583  Lord Mancroft: We were talking about these huge placards, and there is one outside my office for an on-line casino. Will you be able to monitor the effects of those over a period of time?

  Mr Brown: Yes, I think one would have to do that. That would be one of those discussions that one would want to have on an ongoing basis with the Gambling Commission. In pursuing a more liberal regime, one has to be jolly careful that through irresponsible communication one does not create the problem to a greater degree than might happen. I think alcohol, again, is quite an interesting comparison.

  Q1584  Lord Mancroft: Will you or the ASA have the ability to conduct studies to see the effect of that advertising over a period of time? Do you have that ability?

  Mr Brown: Yes. One can commission studies and quite often one does. In difficult areas like kids, for example, at the moment and the discussion about obesity there is an awful lot of research work about the causes, or lack of them, and the interrelationship between communication and obesity. It does seem to me if there areas of social issue and advertising is in some way a stakeholder in that discussion, as they could be in problem gambling, we would need to understand and have a handle on that.

  Q1585  Chairman: Clause 36(5), and it is probably easier if I read it, says as follows: "If information about gambling is brought to the attention of a child or young person and includes the name or contact details of a person to whom payment may be made or from whom information may be obtained, that person (`the advertiser') shall be treated as having committed the offence under subsection (1) unless he proves that the information was brought to the attention of the child or young person—(a) without the advertiser's consent or authority, or (b) as an incident of the information being brought to the attention of adults and without a view to encouraging the child or young person to gamble." Do you think that this is a fair structure?

  Mr Brown: It seems to me that the system should be very potent in dealing with any advertiser who sets out intentionally to communicate and encourage young people to gamble. That seems to me to be right. What we have got to do is devise a way to minimise the effects of unintentional communication because, as I say, you will not be able to cocoon children so that they never see anything. They do read their parents' newspapers, they do see a lot of things. The intentional seems to me guilty as charged, and that is fine, it is the unintentional where the codes of practice become very important.

  Q1586  Viscount Falkland: So far as smoking is concerned we have seen great concern on television and films about people seen to be smoking, that it might be deemed to encourage it. One could say the same thing about gambling. If you went to a Bond film or whatever you might construe pictures of people sitting at tables playing roulette as encouragement, which of course they do not do nowadays because we were told by the preceding witnesses that in fact the tendency of young people is to stand often in a solitary remote relationship with a machine. Do you see any concern springing up about the way in which gambling is portrayed in films and television and so on?

  Mr Brown: No, I do not really. All these things are capable of misuse, of course they are, but I am not particularly aware of them being misused.

  Q1587  Viscount Falkland: No.

  Mr Graham: It is actually quite rare now. I was quite struck this morning watching the business news when they were talking about BAT taking over RJ Reynolds, or vice versa, that the item was illustrated by lots of people smoking and it really jarred because one does not see it very much on television. It may be less of a problem than it really is. I suspect there is more real smoking going on than television smoking.

  Chairman: It is an interesting question because the policy objective from the Government appears to be that they wish to see gambling being seen more as a mainstream leisure activity and the advertising of it, therefore, being permitted with that in mind. Lord Falkland's point is very relevant. It is quite conceivable that more gambling will be seen in soap-type television programmes and that is something you may then get complaints about.

  Lord Faulkner of Worcester: If you listen to The Archers at the moment you will find that there is a very, very serious debate about problem gambling inside one of the families depicted on that show.

  Q1588  Chairman: I am very grateful to Lord Faulkner. I do not listen to The Archers and from what he has said I am glad that I do not.

  Mr Brown: I think that is really an issue for programme codes, not for advertising codes.

  Q1589  Chairman: Yes, it probably is.

  Mr Brown: Certainly looking at alcohol, again, that is one of the areas where broadcasters are looking in relation to binge drinking and there are programmes that are now holding a mirror up to that aspect of society which is not very attractive. Those are programme code issues, they are not advertising code issues.

  Q1590  Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Can I take up the question of gambling and young people. What about advertising for gambling which is undoubtedly going to be seen by people who either have a problem with gambling or have a propensity to become problem gamblers? Do you think that advertisers have a responsibility to address that?

  Mr Brown: Yes, to a degree, but not to the degree that in my view suggests that the advertisement cannot exist at all. I think one of the dilemmas one always has is how much should the rights of the majority be impeded to deal with the problems of a minority? That is one of the dilemmas and it seems to me the codes of practice ought to address that. If advertisements exist in a way which feeds the problem, and it is easy at the moment to think about alcohol, irresponsible alcohol advertisement being seen by alcoholics, if advertisements operate in that way they are almost certainly breaking the codes. It seems to me that you can devise codes which enable competition to exist without feeding the weakness of somebody who has that kind of problem other than, as I said before, if by virtue of seeing any advertisement it encourages such behaviour; I think that goes too far.

  Q1591  Lord Faulkner of Worcester: If one is looking for a mortgage and one looks at advertisements that appear in the press, or increasingly appear on radio, there is a very detailed health warning attached to what happens to you if you fail to keep up your repayments.

  Mr Brown: Yes, there is.

  Q1592  Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Why would it not be appropriate for advertising for harder gambling products to carry the same sort of warning?

  Mr Brown: I think health and wealth warnings are quite a tricky area. There is a lot of evidence that they are not read. There is some evidence that wealth warnings at the bottom of financial services products are put there by the advertisers to find their way round technical problems but they are not actually, they are put there by law, so they do not actually fulfil the function they were set out to do. Those people who have got them do not want to surrender them, although the DTI did remove quite a lot of them without any problem. In Belgium car advertisements have got health warnings saying "Driving a car can be dangerous". What behavioural change is it likely to bring about? I think people know by and large that if you are spending money recklessly you are putting yourself at some risk.

  Q1593  Lord Faulkner of Worcester: We have had loads of witnesses who have told us that people who get gambling problems do not know where to go with those problems. How would it be if those advertisements carried perhaps not a health and wealth warning but a helpline warning, an indication that "If you have a problem with gambling, ring this number"?

  Mr Brown: I think one of the more successful warnings at the moment is for pharmaceutical products which invite everybody to read the leaflet because that is the obvious place for contra-indications. Something that is simple and direct, it seems to me is always worthwhile considering. A lot of the gobbledegook in financial services advertisements is far too complicated and discriminates against the radio, for example, when somebody has got to find the time for it to be read out. When the DTI withdrew some wealth warnings from financial services products the radio bookings for that category of advertising increased by over 70 per cent. It discriminated against that medium.

  Q1594  Lord Faulkner of Worcester: What you are saying is you would not oppose the inclusion of a helpline number?

  Mr Brown: No. It is not a matter of principle, I just think people are inclined to over-estimate the importance of these things and assume that they are unlikely to—

  Mr Graham: We did some research which is available on the ASA website about public attitudes to advertising and people interpreted those wealth warnings in financial services advertisements as protection for the advertiser, not protection for the consumer, so one cannot assume that people will read those and think "Gosh, thank you so much, I had not thought of that".

  Chairman: I promise the Committee this is the last Australian reference I will make this morning, but Lady Golding and I were intrigued that as you entered one of these large casinos in Australia there was a sign on the desk that said your chances of winning on any of these machines was greater than a million to one. Forget about the accuracy of the figures but nobody seemed to take much notice as they walked through the door. We just want to talk briefly about the National Lottery.

  Q1595  Mr Meale: Mr Brown, you said earlier that you did not want a separate or different advertising regulator. You also quoted from your code which is about not encouraging people to gamble and you referred to part of that remit for the under 25s. You went on a little bit about anything which encouraged gambling might break your code. What about the Lottery? Should those products not be to a different set of rules and regulated by a different body? If that was the case, what problems or difficulties would be caused by it?

  Mr Brown: It is kind of where we are at the moment.

  Q1596  Chairman: Indeed.

  Mr Brown: We have got the Lottery Commission which is a statutory regulator with a code. There are some complaints which come into existing advertising regulators about the Lottery but they are very modest. Clearly it is very different from commercial gaming, nobody is going to give commercial gaming half an hour twice a week on BBC. The problem comes if you have got two statutory regulators tackling the Lottery, whether you have got the Commission and the Gambling Commission. That would seem to me to be unnecessary. At the moment, as far as I can see, the Lottery thing works jolly well and it ain't broke so I would not change it. I would not try and extend the remit of the Gambling Commission to include the Lottery, it seems to me to be working fine. That is really from an advertising perspective. The internal workings could be very different, I do not know.

  Q1597  Mr Meale: You say twice a week for half an hour, but of course there is a lot more than that. We have football, which bets are taken on all the time, we have racing which is on for at least 12 hours a day day and night, there are a whole range of gambling activities which are taking place on TV more than the Lottery.

  Mr Brown: Yes.

  Q1598  Mr Meale: The case is that here we have got a product which is encouraging people to gamble quite different from early on in the 1990s when preceding that you were not supposed to encourage people to gamble. It is not a small amount, it is tens of millions of pounds every week. Is it possible to have a different code, a different body, a different regulator? The reason I say that is they are advertisers.

  Mr Brown: Yes, they are and, to be honest, I would have preferred it if the Lottery advertising code fell within the existing advertisement content regulators as we have discussed, but the Government decided not to do it that way. We have a statutory regulator that has got a statutory code and a whole series of privileges that apply to the Lottery. We cannot turn the clock back but I would have preferred to have this kind of discussion about the Lottery and its communication before it was put into being.

  Q1599  Mr Meale: Can I just comment that because the Government have decided that, it does not mean to say that the scrutiny committee would agree.

  Mr Brown: Of course.


 
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