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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 139 xiii HOUSE OF LORDS House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE JOINT Committee on Draft Gambling Bill
Tuesday 3 February 2004 SIR DAVID DURIE and PROFESSOR JONATHAN WOLFF MR PETER COX, MR ADRIAN SCARFE, MR ANTHONY JENNENS and MS FAITH FREESTONE Evidence heard in Public Questions 1306 - 1454
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Joint Committee on the Draft Gambling Bill on Tuesday 3 February 2004 Members present: Mr John Greenway, in the Chair Memorandum submitted by Responsibility in Gambling Trust
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Sir David Durie, Chairman, and Professor Jonathan Wolff, Trustee, Professor of Philosophy at University College London, and lately a member of the Gambling Review Body, Responsibility in Gambling Trust, examined. Q1306 Chairman: Can I welcome Sir David Durie, the Chairman of the Trust, and Professor Jonathan Wolff. It is nice to meet you again, Sir David. May I ask you to note that Chris Bone from the Bill team is present on a speak-if-spoken-to basis. May I also ask you to note that a transcript of the meeting will be produced and placed on the internet within about a week. Will you also note that a full declaration of Members' interests was made at the beginning of the first meeting and that note is available. Can I also ask witnesses and remind the Committee to speak up at all times. These rooms do not have particularly good acoustics. May I ask everyone to turn off their mobile telephones. In my opening comment I referred to the Trust which with effect from today has been renamed the Responsibility in Gambling Trust. I think our first question, Sir David, has to be to ask you to explain why you decided to change the name of the Trust. Sir David Durie: Thank you, Chairman. The previous title in our view did not reflect the purpose of the Trust. Indeed, someone strange to the industry might have thought that it was a Trust to help retired croupiers who had fallen on hard times. In fact, as you know, Chairman, we had a report done for us last year by Professor Collins and I think that report is available to the Committee. He recommended, without suggesting a name, that the Trust should change its name and the trustees agreed but decided to leave the change until after an independent chairman had been appointed, and so it was one of the first questions which I addressed at the beginning of last month. I also thought it important that we should be very clear about what the Trust's mission was and we have adopted and published a mission statement which I would just like to draw attention to. It states that the Trust's aim is to make it less likely that people will become problem gamblers and more likely that those who do will seek and will be able to secure effective help. The trustees believe that that is a very neat encapsulation of what the Trust is about. The intention is that the new name should reflect that name and we chose the Responsibility in Gambling Trust rather than the "Responsible Gambling Trust" because the Trust itself is neutral on gambling and we did not want in any way to convey the idea that we promote gambling, even of a responsible kind. However, if people want to gamble, we want to promote responsibility in that gambling both from the industry and from gamblers so that is why we chose the name Responsibility in Gambling Trust. It is still quite a mouthful and I think many people will probably refer to us as the "Gambling Trust". Q1307 Chairman: Thank you for that very full explanation. Do the existing clauses of the draft Bill and policy statement give you a clear picture of the social responsibility aspects of the proposed gambling regime? If not, what are the key pieces of information that you still need? Sir David Durie: We do not believe at present we have that information. These documents explain the obligations being placed on the Gambling Commission to ensure that the industry operates in a socially responsible way, but it will depend very much on the way in which the Gambling Commission draws up its Code of Practice on social responsibility which licence holders will be required to observe as a condition of their licence and we are not yet clear how they will go about that. We intend to keep in close touch with the Gambling Commission as they develop their ideas and expect to be able to comment on them. Also, we have to say that we are not altogether clear what the role of local authorities will be. Q1308 Mr Wright: Is there a risk that the funding of research, education and treatment through the Trust could be seen as an abdication of Government responsibility, as some have suggested? Secondly, how do you envisage that the Trust would share responsibility for research, education and treatment with others in the public and charitable sectors? Sir David Durie: I find this quite a complicated question. As far as the Trust is concerned, I would start from the proposition that we expect the industry to be able to raise the £3 million a year which the Budd Report recommended by the time the Bill becomes law and the fact that the industry is voluntarily building up to that even at the present stage suggests that it is not a problem for others. As far as the Trust is concerned, we do not take the view that this is a serious problem. As far as research is concerned, although we are funding and will be funding research, if that research is carried out by institutions of higher education, many of the costs of those institutions are borne out of universities' general budgets so there is a government contribution in that way. The area where we are more concerned is that the Government has not yet delivered on the statement which it made in paragraph 10.26 of its document A Safe Bet for Success which said that it agreed with the review body's view, that is the Budd Committee, that NHS mental health services should be prepared to offer assessment and treatment for those with severe gambling problems. The only service which the Trust is aware of that the NHS has ever provided in this respect is the specialist clinic in Sheffield, but its NHS funding was withdrawn several years ago and this is an aspect which the Trust will wish to pursue with the Government. Q1309 Mr Wright: In terms of research and education, do you not think that should be the responsibility of Government rather than the industry itself? Sir David Durie: There are aspects which we think should be the responsibility of the Government itself or the Gambling Commission monitoring what is going on in the industry, prevalence for example, and we think these are tasks for the Government. Research into both the causes of problem gambling and effective means of avoiding problem gambling and of treating problem gamblers we think is an area which the Trust is perfectly willing to fund research into. Q1310 Mr Wright: Turning to DCMS, are there any areas that you consider they should be responsible for in terms of research and if so, what areas? Sir David Durie: I have already mentioned prevalence. Prevalence is a means of finding out exactly what is going on and that is an important area for research. Whether it is needed now is a separate issue, but it is certainly something which needs to be monitored over time. Q1311 Chairman: I asked Lord McIntosh whether or not the Trust might fund a prevalent study and his answer in the Committee was that it perhaps could, but he has subsequently withdrawn that suggestion. I think you are aware of that and the Government accepts in the evidence they have given us that they should pay for prevalence studies. Sir David Durie: You have relieved me, Mr Chairman. I knew he had made the suggestion; I was not aware that he had withdrawn it. We are very glad that he has. Q1312 Chairman: I think that is the correct position. One of the officials from the Department is nodding towards my direction. So we have that assurance that prevalence studies are for the Government to pay for. Sir David Durie: You have made my day! Q1313 Chairman: I am so glad that that is the case. I should have said when we began that in the event of a division, and there may be divisions in the Commons and the Lords this afternoon, we would have to interrupt proceedings and clear the room. I do apologise for that, but let us see how we progress. I am not sure if we have completely cleared up the issue of the treatment provisions through the NHS. Is there any more you want to add about that? Sir David Durie: I think it is disappointing. As far as I am aware there is no current specialism on this in the NHS and no steps that I am aware of have been taken to amend this. The only clinic that did exist has had its funding for this purpose withdrawn. I think that is something which is of concern. Q1314 Viscount Falkland: If it came about that the Trust had to share responsibility in some way with the National Health Service on the treatment of gamblers, how would that be likely to work? I think you have probably answered that it probably would not work very satisfactorily and that they would be the trailing partner. Sir David Durie: I do not think the Trust could take this on very easily. It might be that the outcome of some of our research would be of use to the NHS, but I do not think this is something the Trust could, or indeed should, be doing. Q1315 Lord Wade of Chorlton: How do you compare problem gambling within society and the other issues that the National Health deals with, alcoholism, drug taking, obesity, with the cost and importance within society generally? Sir David Durie: I do not know that we have got any figures for the comparative cost of these. I would think that the cost of dealing with problem gambling across the NHS, if they were were to do it, would be considerably less than the other forms of addiction or complaint that you have identified. Q1316 Lord Wade of Chorlton: Why do you think it is not so accepted and that the other ones I mentioned are dealt with by the NHS but problem gambling is not? Sir David Durie: My guess would be that the scale of the problem has been thought to be much less than the other areas. Professor Wolff: Gambling has been neglected by the Government in a number of ways. I was a member of the Budd Committee and we looked into Government funded research into gambling and problem gambling and we could not find anything, nothing through the Research Councils, nothing through the NHS. For some reason gambling as a whole has been ignored by the Government, not ignored as a source of revenue but as a source of spending. Q1317 Lord Wade of Chorlton: Do you think that is because society does not recognise it as very important either? Professor Wolff: I think society does think it is important and it may be the Government is lagging behind social pressure here, I do not know. Anything we say would be speculative on that. Some of the press coverage of the Budd Report seemed to indicate that there was a lot of social concern about problem gambling. There was very little about the fact the Government has done nothing itself about problem gambling up to this point. Q1318 Lord Mancroft: Bearing in mind what the Trust is aiming to do, does the Trust regard gambling as a moral issue or a health issue? Sir David Durie: I am not sure that the Trust has ever addressed it. I certainly do not regard it as a moral issue. As I had said earlier, the Trust itself is neutral on gambling and I am scarcely neutral on the moral issue. Q1319 Lord Mancroft: If it is going to pay for treatment, it must have a view on whether you are talking about moral treatment or a health care issue. Sir David Durie: In that case the answer has to be that it is a health issue. Q1320 Janet Anderson: Is it not the case that the reason why people do not perceive problem gambling to be such a great problem as obesity or alcoholism because it is not so highly visible? If someone is obese it is fairly obvious or if someone is persistently drunk it is fairly obvious. Could it be that problem gambling is a much bigger problem than we are aware of because it is more likely to be hidden? Professor Wolff: I think that is a very good point. One of the questions asked on the screens to tell whether someone is a problem gambler is, "Have you ever lied about the extent of your gambling?" One thing that problem gamblers say is that you can tell when a problem gambler is lying because they are talking, and there is massive concealment on this issue. Q1321 Viscount Falkland: Surely it is a question of who they deceive. I have known quite a few compulsive gamblers. They have lied to their wives and to their families but they may not lie to their peers. Can you throw some light on that? I have known compulsive gamblers who readily admit the extent of their problems and they readily admit that they lie about it. Professor Wolff: I think you are right, in some cases they lie to employers, they lie to staff and lying to family is very common. Q1322 Mr Meale: Surely previous governments over decades have recognised there is a thing called problem gambling. They have not legalised the recovery of debts through gambling, they have said it is not a recovery route to it except in specific circumstances which have been adopted later on. Surely there has been some research done. I seem to remember there were Research Council monies given to organisations like the CAB who examined the effect of gambling on households and so on and so forth. Sir David Durie: I think the Trust's position is based partly on the work which the Budd Committee did and partly on the work which Professor Collins did for us last year. I would like to remind the Committee of what Professor Collins said to the Trust: "It needs to be recorded at the outset that our researches" - that is his researches - "have confirmed the finding of the Budd Report in this respect, namely that problem gambling remains an under-researched phenomenon and the research that has been undertaken has not produced much in the way of definite conclusions." That is still the position that we face today. It is the reason the Trust is, even as I speak, embarking on a call for proposals for a proper survey of the research that has been done and I can give the Committee details of that if that is of interest. Q1323 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Sir David, this may come as a shock to you, but we have had some witnesses suggest that the formation of the Trust is a ploy by the interests in the industry who want to pass gambling legislation and who really do not care about the number of problem gamblers it creates as long as you are in place to pick up the pieces for them. How do you respond to that? Sir David Durie: First of all, I cannot answer for the motives of others, all I can answer for is for the Trust and the trustees. I am absolutely clear that the trustees are committed to supporting those who need help now as well as in the future. Even if the proposed legislation never becomes law there will still be problem gamblers and thus an important continuing role for the Trust. My expectation, admittedly over a very short period, is that the Trust should be able to continue to secure funding from the industry in support of our aim whatever happens to the Bill. Q1324 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: So you would reject absolutely any suggestion that money paid by the industry to the Trust is a sort of conscience money in order to buy the legislation, as one of our witnesses said? Sir David Durie: All I can do is repeat what I said at the outset in response to your question, which is that I cannot answer for the motives of others. Q1325 Chairman: Referring back to the exchange we had earlier, there is a sharp contrast between what the gambling industry is offering to do because up until now the contributions you have had have been voluntary compared to tobacco and drink. Is there a sense in which if the Government is proposing, as it is in this Bill, to relax some of the restrictions on opportunities to gamble, it is both sensible from the point of view of public policy and also from the point of view of demonstrating that the industry itself takes responsibility for gambling and gambling seriously, that the Trust has been created? Sir David Durie: I think that is right, Chairman. My understanding of the position is that the industry recognises that there was more of a problem than had been addressed in the past and the resources devoted even in the charitable sector to this were very small and very recent even before the Trust came on the scene and that the initiative was taken by the industry. I find it difficult to speak for their motives, but they certainly have recognised that there is a problem and a problem today and one that needs to be addressed. Q1326 Chairman: Maybe I should put the question in another way to Professor Wolff, which is to say that if Sir Alan Budd's report had not recommended this would you both be here today? Sir David Durie: Funnily enough, we had a discussion about this very question this morning and we said the Committee would never ask us this question! Q1327 Chairman: You are a self‑made prophecy by the way. Professor Wolff: I think you are right, had it not been for the Budd Committee and the draft Bill I am sure the Trust would not have existed, but that does not mean there was not feeling within the industry that something like the Trust ought to have existed. There was a very serious co‑ordination problem and a number of other trustees have told me how they thought this should have happened ten years ago, but the industry has never acted as a body until this point, it was only with the legislation in prospect that they could do so. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that all sectors of the industry will benefit from this legislation. It seems to me quite likely that the industry may start cannibalising itself, but even sectors that could lose through liberalisation are still supporting the Trust. Chairman: We can bear out that statement from some of the evidence that we have had over the past few weeks from some sections of the industry who think that they are likely to be affected by this and they are willing payers to your Trust, which brings us neatly to the question of funding. Q1328 Baroness Golding: A number of people have suggested that contributions to the Trust should form part of the mandatory 'fit and proper' tests for operators. What do you think of this suggestion; does it have the benefits of a purely voluntary scheme and also of a statutory levy? Sir David Durie: I think the Trust itself would prefer to have contributions from as wide a section of the gambling industry as possible and that it should be voluntary rather than mandatory for all sorts of reasons which I do not think I need go into. If it was mandatory under the Bill, as we understand it we think it could be quite difficult for the Gambling Commission to refuse licences solely on the grounds that a particular potential licensee operator was not prepared to make a voluntary contribution. I hope that we will be able to continue to rely on voluntary contributions. However, I would like to see the Gambling Commission, if at all possible, encouraging its licensees to make a contribution even if it cannot be done mandatorily. It is an aspect which we will be discussing with the Commission as it begins preparing for the future. Q1329 Baroness Golding: That is very clear. If it does prove necessary to impose a levy, how should the Government go about setting the level of contributions? Do you think it is going to be a possible task for it to do? Sir David Durie: This is quite a difficult area, as I am sure Baroness Golding appreciates, Mr Chairman. The Trust itself has not come up with a formula for a voluntary contribution which is widely acceptable yet and it is something which we will be looking at again ourselves over the coming year. Since we have not yet done it for ourselves I think it would be presumptuous of us to suggest how the Government should do it. Q1330 Dr Pugh: There is a distinction drawn between soft and hard gambling which rather parallels the distinction between soft and hard drugs. How do you think the distinction is drawn? What features does soft gambling have as opposed to other kinds of gambling? Sir David Durie: If I may, I will turn to Professor Wolff who not only is one of our trustees but was on the Budd Committee. I think this is an aspect which he has considered in the past and may be able to inform us about now. Professor Wolff: I am trying to remember what we said about this. The trouble is there is more than one distinction that you can make. One is between high stakes, high loss gambling and low stakes, low loss gambling, and another is between gambling where you have every opportunity to chase your losses and to recycle winnings, which gives you the frequency of repeating the experience. So the two things are not the same in that you can have higher stakes, non‑repeatable gambling but, more worryingly, low stake, loss chasing gambling. On some definitions of hard gambling playing fruit machines comes out as hard gambling because you have the opportunity to chase losses and recycle winnings very rapidly. Table games in casinos are often hard gambling in both senses. Buying a lottery ticket in a weekly lottery is probably soft gambling in both senses. Q1331 Dr Pugh: Is the hard gambling a more addictive kind of gambling? You are not exclusively saying that, are you? You want to include in hard gambling stuff that may not be addictive but may have higher stakes, in other words you can lose a lot of money but not go on doing so. Professor Wolff: That is right. What you could say is hard gambling is gambling that is more likely to lead the gambler into problems in their life and so addictive gambling and very high stake gambling, both these problems. Q1332 Dr Pugh: So bingo is soft gambling because you are not likely to be seriously addicted or, if you are, you are not likely to do yourself much harm, is that right? Professor Wolff: That seems right. The addictiveness is whether you can chase your losses and, if you have lost, can you gamble again straightaway. So the fruit machine has that. With bingo you have to wait until the next day. Q1333 Dr Pugh: Do you think soft gambling is a less problematic form of gambling? If we adopt something like "the polluter pays" principle, would the suggestion be that those motives of soft gambling could contribute less and could create a bigger problem? Sir David Durie: I do not think it is necessarily as simple as that. As I say, the Trust itself has not worked out a basis and I am sure that those who are more concerned with soft gambling rather than hard gambling would seek to make that argument. We will need to address it but we have not got the answer to it now. It is true to say, whether gambling is soft or hard on your definition, that there are problem gamblers in all sections. If you look at the prevalence study it shows that problem gamblers indulge in all sorts of gambling. It does not tell us anything about the cause of the problem gambling; it tells us more about the habits of problem gamblers, so I do not think you can argue that there is any form of gambling which is problem-free. I do not think that is the case. Q1334 Dr Pugh: In terms of contributing towards your organisation we have to have a mechanism that is transparent, that is fair, that presses the various gambling interests right across the country into making their appropriate contribution. Sir David Durie: Up to a point. If I can go back to what the Trust is for, I have said that the Trust is not there to buy into the Gambling Bill or anything of that sort. The Trust is there to make it less likely that people will become problem gamblers and more likely that those who do will be able to seek and secure effective help. That is what we are about. If we get tied up into arguments as to who should be contributing and who should not be contributing instead of concentrating on having an effect on problem gambling we will be deluding ourselves. Q1335 Dr Pugh: Are there any areas of the industry that are particularly remiss in contributing? Sir David Durie: Up to now we have not had a contribution from Camelot. We will be getting a significant contribution from Camelot next year. There are some other small areas of the industry which have not contributed much, if anything. Q1336 Dr Pugh: But, to be fair, they will take the line that they are not creating any kind of problem. Their defence will be that there are very few people excessively addicted to the lottery. Sir David Durie: They are contributing next year. Chairman: They made that clear to us this morning. Q1337 Mr Meale: Can I return to the answer you gave Baroness Golding when you were intimating that you would rather have a voluntary than a mandatory levy? I find that amazing because it is contradictory to some of the things you said earlier about research that you want to fund in different areas. You want to revisit the area of the National Health Service and a partnership there, and also possibly with the Home Office, so a government-supported fund. Here we have a situation where the taxpayer will fund it but the polluter, the causer of the problem, would not. That seems to me contradictory. With regard to the people who fund your organisation, do the organisations of BBOA (British Betting Offices' Association) and the bookmakers make large contributions to you? Sir David Durie: The two associations have combined into a single one. It is now the Association of British Bookmakers. They did make a significant contribution last year. I do not have the figure in my head. Certainly they and their members we expect to make a much bigger contribution next year. Q1338 Mr Meale: They have already been in front of this Committee and we know that they have great difficulties over the levy. In fact, the Chief Executive of the latter of those, what was the BBOA, actually said that he would welcome a statutory rather than a voluntary levy because he and his organisation had great difficulty in getting their membership to pay up. Can I also point out to you that, even for those in that industry who do pay the levy, much of that levy goes in the form of promotion for successful winnings of greyhounds which go straight to the owners or trainers of those greyhounds. The money does not go into the problems of welfare, whether it be for the animals involved or indeed some of the people who have problems with gambling. I put it to you that "the polluter pays" principle is something which is quite important to us. I do not think you will ever be in a stronger position, whatever the motives and the reason for people coming along and suddenly joining up to the charity which you are in charge of, to demand monies for the kind of research that you are looking at carrying out. Sir David Durie: Certainly the threat in the Bill, that if sufficient money is not forthcoming to the charity on a voluntary basis there will be a statutory levy to enforce it, I think is something which concentrates the minds, certainly of the larger and the more responsible elements of the industry, and I make a distinction between the two. There are large elements and there are responsible elements. If you look now at the situation which the Trust is in compared with the situation at the time it started its work two or three years ago, I think it has made immense strides and although the ABB does have difficulty with a number of its members about securing contributions for the Trust at present I would hope that, as the Trust becomes more established and more recognised and the importance of social responsibility within the gambling industry becomes more widely accepted, we will get wider and more extensive contributions. That is certainly what the Trust is hoping for. Mr Meale: Are you aware that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he enabled the voluntary levy scheme for greyhound races to occur, warned the industry that unless they paid up he would make it statutory? He returned to that subject on two further occasions on the floor of the House and again warned the industry and still to this day there is no statutory levy and still to this day there are a lot of people who will not pay the levy. Do you know that? Chairman: This is a voluntary levy for greyhounds. The statutory levy for horse racing is to be abolished and the Commons finished that Bill last night, and it will go before your Lordships, so we will see. Q1339 Lord Falkland: When we were talking about hard and soft gambling you mentioned, quite rightly, chasing losses. From my observation of heavy gamblers or losers it seems that the thrill of gambling relates to chasing losses. If there is such a thing as responsible gambling, in my view - and I do not know whether you would agree - responsible gamblers do not chase their losses, so if you can spot somebody who is chasing their losses you have got somebody who is a potential problem gambler because that is where the thrill is. The truism that is often bandied about, that gamblers do not want to win money because they like losing it, could be true to the extent that you have to lose money before you get it back. The real thrill is getting level again, so could this not be a key to the proper treatment particularly of young gamblers because you can spot them, I think, very easily early on by whether they want to chase their losses or not? Some do, some do not. What would your reaction be to that? Professor Wolff: I think it is very likely you are right, that problem gamblers do have that one thing in common: they will chase their losses. I do not think we have any information ourselves about how easy this is to spot but it certainly is something that should be looked into. Q1340 Lord Donoghue of Ashton: Following up what Alan Meale has said, I note your reluctance to accept a strong link for your institution between the role of dealing with problem gambling and the role of raising money in order to deal with it. I understand that and I am sure your position would be inclined the same way but I am not sure it would necessarily survive full scrutiny. In this area the Lords Minister, Lord McIntosh, has commented that it is not "the end of the world if there are a few free-riders". In your experience to date how great has the free-rider problem been within particular sectors? Sir David Durie: The Trust is not well informed about the situation within each of the sectors which contribute. We have already discussed the situation in the Association of British Bookmakers. Some sectors have been more successful than others in encouraging all their members to contribute. I think that in some cases they have succeeded in getting all their members to contribute and, as I have said on two occasions, the wider the base the happier the Trust is about this. It is not that we are indifferent to the problem but our aim is to get the money to do the things which we believe need to be done and for us it is a secondary problem that not everybody is contributing. Q1341 Lord Wade of Chorlton: Are the targets of £1.8 million for the next financial year, rising to £3 million in 2006/2007, realistic estimates of what is needed and, if not, what amount would you suggest? Sir David Durie: Let me start with where we will be next year. We expect to raise at least £1.8 million next year, which is a 50 per cent increase over the current year, which itself was about 50 per cent increase over last year, so that is a pretty large rate of expansion. Given that the money should be spent effectively, we need also to consider the question of the capacity of the various service providers and of the researchers whom we are funding to provide us with value for money. In terms of the short term, even up to the £3 million in two years' time, I think that we will be able to raise all that we can effectively spend. Whether £3 million is the right figure for the medium term or indeed the longer term I think can only be a matter of speculation. I think the £3 million figure was originally suggested by the Budd Committee and when it did so it recognised that there was no particular magic to that figure. It is certainly something which the Trust itself intends to keep under review but at the moment it is not an immediate problem for us. Q1342 Lord Wade of Chorlton: Considering the information we have had, that we are talking about what is now an £8 billion business, maybe rising to a £12 billion business in the next few years when the Bill goes through, do you not think these are very small figures in relation to the size of such an industry (if we are relying upon those conclusions) to deal with these issues? Sir David Durie: Indeed. There is no doubt that those figures are small in relation to the turnover (and indeed the profits) of the industry, but the question is, are more funds needed and, if they are, can they be used effectively? Nobody has come forward yet with convincing arguments that either of those is the case. The Trust will seek from the industry whatever funds the Trust believes are necessary for it to fulfil and implement its published strategy effectively. Q1343 Lord Wade of Chorlton: May I just ask a further question? On the basis that you are saying you would prefer a voluntary system, what kind of a fund-raising organisation are you going to need, do you think, to raise even £3 million out of that £12 billion or £8 billion industry, which is what it is now? Sir David Durie: In the past the Trust has worked through the trade associations. For the forthcoming year we have worked with a mixture of the large companies and the trade associations and that has proved effective in raising the target which we had for next year. Whether that will always prove to be the case I do not know, but I think it will for the next couple of years or so, at any rate. The Trust works through others. We do not employ vast numbers of people. We have got two part-time paid people working for us at the moment and so we are operating on a shoestring even though we are being quite effective in raising the money, and effective too, I believe, in spending it. Q1344 Lord Wade of Chorlton: But you do not have your own professional team of fund raisers? Sir David Durie: No. Q1345 Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: How much would be too much? Sir David Durie: Too much would be more than we could usefully spend. I am sorry - I am not deliberately being obscure, but we are not in that business at the moment. If we were, say, to get £10 million for the coming year we would not be able to spend it effectively. Q1346 Janet Anderson: My question is linked to Lord Brooke's. You are saying £10 million would be too much and if you had that amount of money you would not know what to do with it, but you did say earlier that you were operating on a shoestring. If you did have an increase in funding is there anything that you would do that you are not doing now because you cannot afford to do it? Sir David Durie: Sorry - when I am talking about a shoestring I mean a very small proportion of our budget is spent on our own expenses as opposed to funding research or education. Q1347 Chairman: You are not extravagant? Sir David Durie: No; that is what I mean. I think the £1.8 million that we will have available for next year will be enough for the things that we can usefully spend on next year. Q1348 Janet Anderson: So there is nothing else that you feel you could be doing which you cannot afford to do at the moment? Sir David Durie: Not at the moment, no. We have not got into discussion yet with our service providers about their requirements going into the second half of this year but from what I know I think it would be very difficult. Chairman: We look forward later on this afternoon to asking GamCare how they might want to spend £10 million, but I will leave them to answer that. Q1349 Lord Mancroft: Could I ask you to turn to the issue of the independence of the Trust? I accept fully that those who pay money have a certain interest in where it is being spent and properly spent. How independent of the industry is the Trust? I go further. How far should that independence go? What future steps are you proposing to make sure that it becomes more independent, if that is right, and is also seen to be more independent? On the other side of the coin, what are the benefits of having representatives of the trade associations involved in the Trust? How can you balance that? Sir David Durie: First of all let me say that the present position is that the Trust has ten trustees, four of whom, including myself as Chairman, are independent and six of whom are industry trustees. We have started the process of looking for, and I am confident we will find, three more independent trustees. We have recently in our newsletter said that the kinds of people we are looking for are people with experience of counselling, education, finance or law, other forms of addiction and treatment and problem gamblers. Clearly, we will not with three people get all of that but those are the kinds of people we are looking for. We will then have seven independent trustees as a majority over the industry. The current way the Trust is set up follows precisely, with one exception, the recommendation that the Budd Report made. The exception is that we have not sought to put on the Trust any of the service providers, anybody connected with the service providers of the fund. We think that that would cause a very difficult conflict of interest. The Budd Committee did not recommend that there should be a majority of independent trustees. It was the industry trustees themselves who decided that the Trust would be better with that independence. The spending decisions the Trust makes go first to a committee of the independent trustees who examine the proposals that are being made and make recommendations to the full Trust, so they are not influenced in those recommendations by the industry. I think that the Trust is being set up in a way that it is able to operate reasonably independently of the industry. On the other hand, as Lord Mancroft has recognised, there are real benefits to the Trust in having people from the industry present, both in terms of - and I am stealing Professor Wolff's thunder - a reality check on what the Trust is about but also in terms of assuring themselves that the Trust is spending their money wisely and, indeed, one of the things that we must continue to do better is to ensure that the Trust does convince the industry that it is spending their money wisely. My own experience of the Trust's activities is very recent and if you want further information about how the Trust operates in practice Professor Wolff, who has been a Trustee for much longer, can add to that. Q1350 Lord Donoghue of Ashton: Can I just link back to the contributions? Some of the main beneficiaries of this legislation may be the large overseas companies which have given evidence to us and have spoken of their worth being five billion, six billion, seven billion a year. Are any of those currently giving? Have any of those promised to give and, if so, what are the sums involved? Sir David Durie: I cannot give you the sums. My present position is that we have three of them who have agreed to contribute very significant sums next year. If you want a note about it I can let you have a note. Chairman: That would be helpful. Q1351 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Continuing the independence theme, Sir David, presumably, as you are spending money on treatment and helping people with problems, it is likely that you will come across common factors in forms of gambling which will cause you concern. There may well be a new game or a new form of gambling activity operated by one of the contributors to the Trust which is giving rise to an inordinately high proportion of problem gamblers compared with other games. Would you see it as your duty to tell that operator that he should stop operating that sort of game and, if you did, what would happen to your contribution? Sir David Durie: I do not think it is for the Trust to tell somebody what to do or what not to do. I think on the other hand if we came across a situation where the Trust was sure that a particular innovation was harmful in terms of significantly adding to the issue of problem gambling the Trust has a duty, going back to what we are about, to draw attention to that both publicly and to the Gambling Commission and, indeed, to our contributors. Whether they would go on supporting us is for them but I do not think it is something which the Trust would or should shirk from. Q1352 Chairman: But it brings us back to the role of the Gambling Commission in what you do, does it not, because it would be for them presumably, as the people who license these various activities and permit them to take place, to pass judgment on whether or not they were suitable or whether there elements of what was going on that needed to be addressed, and I still cannot quite understand why you seemed so reluctant in your earlier answer - and forgive me if I misunderstood you - to say that the contributions to your Trust ought not to be part of the "fit and proper" test that the Commission will apply. Sir David Durie: No, I did not say it should not be. I said that I saw difficulties about making it. Either we are a charity funded by voluntary contributions or we are a quasi-state body, it seems to me. At the moment we are the former rather than the latter and that is the way that certainly the Trust prefers it to be. Professor Wolff: Can I add something on this now that you have mentioned the "fit and proper" test? It seems that one possible way forward would be that the contribution to the Trust would be seen as one way of meeting some obligations under the "fit and proper" test. Q1353 Chairman: That is what we had in mind. Professor Wolff: But that is very different from saying that that is the only way we can meet the "fit and proper" test. Q1354 Chairman: Oh, no, I was not making that suggestion at all. I was simply making the point that it is less draconian and less of a public body route, which you have mentioned, if simply the Commission, as part of its overall assessment of fitness and properness, took into account whether people were voluntarily giving you money. Sir David Durie: Certainly there is no difference between us on that. The Trust is very strongly in favour of that. It is the difference between voluntary and compulsory. Professor Wolff: I think everyone would accept this and it is one way of meeting the free-rider problem. Should some organisation have developed very bad relations with the Trust, for whatever reason, we would not want that to be enough for them to lose their licence if they did not contribute. There should be other ways of meeting a "fit and proper" test as well if it ever came to that. Q1355 Lord Mancroft: Do you think it would help to redress or eliminate the perception that there might be some bias in the sectional interests if the organisation responsible for raising contributions was somehow separated from the body that recommends the allocation of funds? Sir David Durie: If I may I will ask Professor Wolff to comment on that. I would just say that I have seen no evidence of the problem in my short time as Chairman, but perceptions are important, which is why the Trust is going for a majority of independent trustees and is working in the way in which I have described, which gives predominance to the views and actions of the independent trustees. Professor Wolff has been at it longer than I have and I am sure can talk about how the Trust has been operating in recent months. Professor Wolff: I see no bias or sectional interest. I have been very impressed with the way in which the trustees have adopted a responsible perspective and there has been no sectional interest at all, though we do accept that perception is very important here and this is the main reason - it has got nothing to do with money - why we wanted the Commission to undertake the prevalence studies rather than the Trust, because if we funded the prevalence study and they told us that problem gambling was falling, the idea that this would be believed by anyone when it was funded with industry monies would be ridiculous. The prevalence study has to be independent from the funding source, but for other forms of research, other forms of treatment, there seems to be no reason why there should be a perception problem there. Q1356 Mr Meale: The Committee has received evidence suggesting a wide variety of areas into which the Trust should fund research, for instance, Quaker Action on Alcohol and Drugs have suggested research on alcohol consumption and gambling and also, bearing in mind the change of name of your own charity, they have also suggested that "the effectiveness of the Codes of Responsibility in promoting responsible practice and reducing problem gambling should themselves be the subject of research and audit", and can you explain to the Committee the research that the Trust has chosen so far to fund and why it has prioritised these particular areas? Sir David Durie: The initial research which the Trust funded was the work of Professor Collins, which I have referred to on a number of occasions. That report noted that the academic literature relating to problem gambling is substantial but the research does not produce very much in the way of definite conclusions. The Trust has set up an independent panel to advise us on the funding of research and we have made an initial allocation to it of £250,000. Those experts were chaired by one of our trustees, Dr Guy of the Economic and Social Research Council, and the panel, which includes representatives from the department and from the Gaming Board, has recommended that the Trust's first priority should be to commission systematic reviews of world-wide research on the subject areas relevant to the Trust's priorities to ascertain whether available research already provides any adequate answers to clarify areas requiring, and the priorities for, future research. The Trust has accepted that advice and, as I mentioned earlier, it has now advertised for tenders for that consultancy, so basically over the coming months we will be seeking (and I am sure getting) reports on the adequacy, the content and the nature of, I hope, most of the research that has been done across the world. The key elements of this research review are to identify the development of risk factors for problem gambling, the intervention options for the treatment of problem gambling and the effectiveness of those options, the impact of alternative approaches to public education, and awareness raising about the risk of gambling and the assessment of those approaches. We are asking the researchers to look not only at UK research but, also, from across the world. The aim of this will be to guide the Trust in its further activities, both in terms of what further research we commission but also in terms of what activities, both educational and treatment, we should be supporting. Q1357 Mr Meale: So we have a wide variety of research that you are looking at, not only in this country, which has been done, but also what further research should be done here and from abroad. So it is a fairly substantial task you have set yourself. Who in the Trust decides what you are going to do first and the services that are actually to be funded? Sir David Durie: As I say, we have put out today this request for tenders. The research panel will assess those requests with a view to making recommendations on them by the end of March, and for this initial research to be carried forward, basically, through the summer. It is in the light of that (we will be asking for both interim and final reports in July and September) that we will decide how to take matters forward beyond that. Q1358 Mr Meale: So that will be the Trust itself; the members of the board will actually decide. Sir David Durie: The Trust itself. However, we have got two separate things: one, we have a research panel which is drawn from outside the Trust as well as from the trustees, and then we have a committee of independent trustees who make recommendations on spending research. In the end, it is the Trust as a whole that will take the decisions. Q1359 Mr Meale: It is a substantial and significant task you have just outlined - the research which is needed from here and abroad. Final question: bearing that in mind, what you have outlined in your financial needs - £1.8 million to £3 million ultimately - represents .001 per cent. Do you really think you can deliver that with that kind of minimal funding? Sir David Durie: Research is relatively inexpensive. The problem with research is making sure that we have got properly qualified, good quality researchers. They are in short supply. Q1360 Mr Meale: Do you think that budget of .001 per cent is sufficient to deliver that? Sir David Durie: I think it should be. Q1361 Janet Anderson: You said earlier, Professor Wolff, that you did not think it would be appropriate for the Trust to do a prevalence study, but I wonder if I could put to you and Sir David, would the Trust be willing to commit itself to raising awareness of problem gambling, even if this inflated the impression of the extent of the problem and potentially had a negative impact on the industry's profits? Sir David Durie: The Trust strategy already permits the Trust to doing so, and I would expect the Trust always to be ready to act in ways which supported its aim. Q1362 Janet Anderson: So you would be willing to do more to raise the awareness of problem gambling? Sir David Durie: Indeed. Awareness of problem gambling and awareness of the pitfalls that accompany problem gambling must in itself be a way of diminishing the phenomenon. We want to make it less likely that people will become problem gamblers, and if awareness is part of that then awareness we will promote. Q1363 Janet Anderson: Do you think you could devote more funding to raising awareness of problem gambling if you had additional funding? Could you do more? Sir David Durie: I am sure we could, but I think we need to be careful that what we are doing is effective. Chairman: It is early days. We need to ask you a couple of questions about existing service providers. Q1364 Jeff Ennis: If the Trust becomes the sole provider of funds to organisations like GamCare and Gordon House (which will be giving evidence shortly), is there a danger that the Trust would control and possibly even restrict their activities, thus affecting the independence of service providers? Is there also a risk that they could obtain less from you than they do at the present time? Sir David Durie: This is an interesting area. I am not aware that we have sought to restrict either of the providers who we currently fund from pursuing other activities funded elsewhere, nor can I envisage that we would do so. It is, however, important to secure value for the money we provide and that we ensure that the activities which we do fund are effective in securing the Trust's aim. That is what we are trying to do. As to whether these organisations will have less money than in the past, the advent of the Trust has resulted in quite large increases in the funds available to both the organisations which we fund, and provided that the Trust is satisfied that we are getting value for money I would expect the Trust to want to continue to work with our current service providers, in which case I would expect the funds available to them to continue to increase if this is appropriate. The Trust is committed to using its funds in the most cost-effective way and that will continue to be a priority for us. Q1365 Jeff Ennis: It has been suggested that three-year rolling funding should be made available for service providers, and I understand that this is not available for the existing service providers. Can you therefore explain how you can ensure continuity of current service provision? Sir David Durie: The Trust itself does not have an absolute assurance that we have got three years' funding. I am confident that we will have but it is one thing being confident and it is another thing to contract on that basis. The other thing is that we need to have continued confidence in our service providers to provide the service that we want. I am not against three-year rolling, in principle; whether it is appropriate and whether it is something we can move to fast I could not tell you. Q1366 Jeff Ennis: You have touched on my last question today. Given the importance of providing effective treatment and education, do you think grants should be based on the lowest tender or on providing value for money? Sir David Durie: Value for money. Q1367 Lord Mancroft: I wonder if I could ask you to go a bit further. Earlier on in your evidence you told us that you expected treatment for people with gambling problems to be rather less expensive than treatment for people with drug and alcohol problems. I am not an expert but I happen to have an interest in providing drug and alcohol treatment, and I could not help but notice - and I said this when we visited GamCare - that GamCare's unit costs are very much higher than the treatment provided in my sector. I also noticed in the evidence submitted that the cost of treatment at Gordon House over the length of time is very much higher than we would provide in our sector. It is not a criticism of anybody because it is a different attitude entirely, but how are you going to achieve that? How are you going to know you are being effective? How will you compare with other potential providers? It is an important thing to do but I am not quite clear how you achieve it. Sir David Durie: I am sure you appreciate that is the $64,000 question. I did not mean to convey the impression that the treatment of individual problem gamblers is less expensive than the treatment of an individual alcoholic or drug addict; I was talking in aggregate because this is certainly a smaller-scale problem than alcohol and probably a smaller-scale problem than drug addiction. The Trust is seeking value for money and will always continue to seek value for money. We have, as our written evidence described, certain concerns at the moment. We have discussed the concerns which we have with GamCare and I am satisfied that GamCare is taking steps to address them. It is right for the Trust to raise those concerns with the provider and for the provider to address them, and it is right also for the Trust to consider, from time to time, whether to go to alternative service providers, either on the grounds of effectiveness or on grounds of cost. It is not an easy balance to strike, and we certainly do not want to undermine in any way any of the existing service providers. I think our preference would be to ensure that they are providing the service we want, if that is at all possible. Q1368 Lord Walpole: You explained in your submission that you "arranged for the delivery of services to be provided by GamCare and the Gordon House Association to be independently audited quarterly". Why are those audits necessary? Sir David Durie: This was fairly early in our association with both these bodies and we wanted to be satisfied that the services which the organisations were providing, or had agreed to provide, were actually being delivered. The audit is of service delivery and we asked for it for that purpose. Q1369 Lord Walpole: Your submission makes it clear that the last quarter audit of service providers has identified room for improvement. What can be done to help the existing providers address areas of weakness? Who should do that? Incidentally, what you do not say in your written evidence (you as a body), do you in fact have paid staff, or do you have nobody at all other than the trustees and the secretary? Sir David Durie: In effect, we have trustees, a secretary and a small amount of administrative assistance. Q1370 Lord Walpole: So you are not capable of doing things? Sir David Durie: We are not currently set up to do that. That was deliberate and it remains the Trust's policy. Q1371 Lord Walpole: I am sure it is one we strongly approve of. Who addresses weaknesses? Sir David Durie: I think it is for the body concerned to address the weaknesses. We are very happy to discuss approaches with them, but I think it is for the body to decide. Q1372 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you describe the relationship between yourselves and GamCare and Gordon House, where 10 is warm and friendly and 1 is ice cold? Sir David Durie: I would certainly answer that somewhere in the region of 9 or 10. I will be listening to the answer from my colleagues from GamCare. Q1373 Chairman: That would be interesting if we were to ask them the same question. Can I thank you, Sir David and Professor Wolff, for your attendance today and for the answers. I think it is just worth noting, in fact, that the Trust did not exist before the Budd Report, and there is a lot to do in implementing the Budd Report through legislation. I think what you have told us today and what we have observed ourselves is that this is one part of what Budd recommended where progress has been made. As to the point about the number of staff, a lot of people have given a lot of time voluntarily to get you where you are, and I would certainly want the Committee to make a note of that. Thank you for your attendance. Sir David Durie: Thank you Chairman. Memorandum submitted by The Gordon House Association Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Peter Cox, Managing Director, Mr Adrian Scarfe, Clinical Practice Manager, Mr Anthony Jennens, Trustee, GamCare, and Ms Faith Freestone, Project Director, Gordon House, examined. Q1374 Chairman: Can I now welcome Peter Cox, the Managing Director of GamCare, Adrian Scarfe, the Clinical Practice Manager - I know that because we met you at GamCare. It is nice to see you again. Mr Scarfe: Nice to see you. Q1375 Chairman: And we welcome back Anthony Jennens, who was here the other day in his guise as planning consultant, who is a Trustee of GamCare, and Faith Freestone, who is the Project Director of Gordon House Association. Can I begin by asking you whether you could usefully spend £10 million? Mr Cox: We could very happily spend £10 million because we genuinely feel that there are more problem gamblers out there than we know about at the moment. They need to know about our existence so that they can contact us and get the help they need at an early stage. Q1376 Chairman: In other words, notwithstanding the fact that the Trust is a relatively young creation, and really has to walk before it can run, so to speak, you think that the incidence of problem gambling already is sufficient for much more money to be spent, and your organisation can spend it. Mr Cox: Yes. Mr Jennens: Yes. Ms Freestone: Without wishing to be ungenerous to my colleagues, I would be quite happy to give GamCare £9 million tomorrow and keep the £1 million ourselves. Our treatment provision is full, we have nowhere to put people. Q1377 Chairman: We may come on to this. How many people are waiting to go into your facility? Ms Freestone: As we speak, the situation is worsening by the day. Over the weekend we were holding six male applicants and one female applicant, and when you consider we have over 35 residential spaces for females, it is building by the day. We are asking addictive gamblers to wait when they cannot wait. I could spend your £1 million tomorrow and give £9 million to my colleagues with pleasure. Q1378 Chairman: Do the existing clauses of the draft Bill and policy statement give you a clear picture of the social responsibility aspect of the proposed regime for the regulation of gambling in the United Kingdom? If not, what are the key pieces of information you are lacking? Mr Jennens: By and large the Bill does an excellent job of requiring everyone to pay attention to the very important matter of social responsibility. There is, however, a lack of policy detail, and the implementation of codes of practice appears to be delegated to the Gambling Commission. (I refer to Chapter 6, paragraphs 20 and 36 of the policy document.) Sir David Durie also alluded to this in his speech, and I concur with him that we, too, would like to be in close touch with the Gambling Commission when policy is formed and codes of practice are agreed. In the general matter of social responsibility, the genie is very much out of the bottle, and one would imagine it would be hard for the gambling industry to back-track on promises to have regard for all the issues of problem gambling, protecting the vulnerable etc. Sir David Durie's statement did offer us some reassurance in the statement of their aims which they published the other day on the net too. They are now desirous, like us, of making the world a better place for existing problem gamblers and preventing them from being more problem gamblers. That has not necessarily previously been the case. However, we are still greatly concerned that should the Bill be delayed or even fail, the volume, availability and complexity of gambling will continue to grow but there will be no commensurate increase in the services which GamCare can provide to alleviate the increased needs. If I may quote from one of the trustees of, as was, The Gambling Industry Charitable Trust, "If the Bill fails we will, of course, continue to be socially responsible but we just won't demonstrate it with our chequebooks." The Trust has committed itself to raising £3 million each year after the Bill comes into force; actually in their policy statement announced last week they said that £3 million would not be raised until 06/07. On the existing timetable, Royal Assent for this Bill should be granted in spring 2005 - so it will be sometime after that. Frequently Sir Alan Budd is quoted as saying that the £3 million was not intended to be raised until after the Bill passed. If he did say that it was most certainly not in the Gambling Review, in which he said, if I may remind you all, that his aim was to provide a level of funding approaching £10 per problem gambler, so something around £3 million. He said to raise this there should be a statutory levy. He said "We think this sum looks modest in comparison with New Zealand, Canada and Australia, where the funding per problem gambler equates to about £44, £40 and £26 respectively", yet at no point does he say that this should be after the Bill has been passed. I think this is a concern. As Lord Wade said earlier, the amount of £3million by comparison with the closed game revenues is extremely small, extremely small. Yes, greater funds can be used effectively. I would further point out that the sum of £2.3 million mentioned in Chapter 6 paragraph 32 was raised over two years and, therefore, looks slightly less impressive and less near the £3 million target, and is illustrated in the policy statement of the Bill. He concludes by saying that the other gaps which there may be are going to become apparent during the further responses to questions during the course of the afternoon. Q1379 Viscount Falkland: The GamCare 2000 report states that you are "beginning to suspect that the prevalence of problem gambling may be rising ... [and that this] is a factor we should all keep very much in mind as new legislation is progressed." How should this inform our scrutiny of the Bill? Mr Cox: The Committee should take into account that GamCare is receiving communications from gamblers who are indulging in a wider range of gambling activities than ever before. In the past, GamCare's clients have probably stemmed from difficulties with horses and fruit machines, largely. However, now remote gambling and fixed odds betting terminals are becoming a regular issue to deal with. Gamblers now enjoy a range of gambling indulgences. The considerable international interest in developing business in the UK has been stimulated by the prospects of the Bill. Whilst the UK should welcome the inward investment, at the same time it should also send out strong signals through this Committee that companies do this because of the opportunity to improve their profits. Consequently, if there is going to be increased business, it surely must follow that there will be a rise in problem gambling. Q1380 Dr Pugh: You have mentioned fixed odds betting terminals and remote gambling and they are, in a sense, a new dimension to gambling. What particularly have you picked up from your study of that? Mr Cox: With fixed odds betting terminals they are becoming an issue, as we spotted in 2002. I scanned some 2003 figures before I came here (they have still got to be verified and published) but it seems as if there is an increasing trend for asking us for help on FOBTs; from a few calls per month in early 2003 we are now receiving between 40 and 50 calls a month. So it is a rising trend. For those clients who come to our offices for confidential, face-to-face counselling, 14 per cent of new clients have run into problems with FOBTs versus a minimal number in 2002. Q1381 Dr Pugh: Is this because the problem gambler goes for something new and novel, or are we generating problem gambling that would not be there were it not for their existence? Mr Cox: They are an additional form of gambling, particularly in bookmakers. I suspect it is an environment where in the past it has been a fairly slow considered method of gambling; people look at the form, assess who they want to put their bets on, take time to do so, watch the race and then see the result come back. Q1382 Dr Pugh: Would it be fair to say that converting a percentage, maybe only a small percentage, of normal gamblers into problem gamblers? Is that what is happening? Mr Cox: Yes. Ms Freestone: With your permission - and these are not my words, they are a recent applicant who we have just taken into Gordon House. He actually said "FOBTs are the crack cocaine of gambling." What we are seeing is not only a numerical increase, we are seeing a new form of hybrid gambler. FOBTs are like a catalyst or an accelerant. On and off-course betters, who may never have had a problem because they could control their betting on horse racing, have added FOBTs in, and they now play casino roulette alongside their off-course betting. Fruit machine gamblers who are naturally attracted to machines have found a new toy to play with, and casino gamblers can now play roulette on the high street before the casinos are open. What we have noticed is this has been very rapid. There is usually a delay between a new type of gambling and when people come in for the severest end of treatment. With spread-betting it was a couple of years, with FOBTs, in the case of two individuals, it has been a matter of weeks. Something is going on out there that we are not fully aware of, not in control of or that we, as treatment providers, fully understand, because we are now dealing with a hybrid gambler who cuts across the normal boundaries. Q1383 Dr Pugh: And remote gambling and so on? Ms Freestone: Particularly for women. Q1384 Chairman: Remote gambling for women? Ms Freestone: Yes. Mr Cox: We took about 250 callers who experienced problems in 2003 and the trend is steadily increasing month-on-month. The interesting fact is that 20 of those - which is only a fairly small percentage at the moment - were females. It is an environment where they feel comfortable. Q1385 Dr Pugh: You must have seen many changes in gambling over the years with Lottery gambling and all sorts of different types of facilities developing. Is this a very dramatic fluctuation of the kind you have not seen before or is it simply what normally happens with a new product? Ms Freestone: We are four months into a trend which has bucked, where applications and admissions have always varied, because for an addict the crisis point is quite individual. I would be inclined to say that this is something different and new and something we must be aware of. For our applications to double and double again for four months in succession is unprecedented in our record-keeping history. Q1386 Dr Pugh: So if FOBTs are the crack of the gambling industry, what is internet gambling? Mr Cox: The 24/7 opportunity to do a bit more than you may normally do at other times. Q1387 Viscount Falkland: I am interested in what Faith Freestone was saying there. We went to the Slot Machine Exhibition and were watching a roulette machine - and I got slightly twitchy because I used to go to casinos and I do not nowadays - and MY colleagues were very impressed because I watched the very quick - 20 seconds I suppose - spins of the thing until you got the result and I said, "It's about time zero came up" and zero did then come up and I felt rather clever and I thought to myself as I went away, "Down, Fido"! What you are really saying, I think, and I absolutely agree with you if you are saying it, is that it is the speed now with which people can gamble and move on to the next punt, and you are bound to get an increased acceleration of problems related to it. I relate that to what I said - you probably heard - to our previous witnesses, that it is a question of chasing losses. You start to chase losses much more quickly in this environment with the attendant problems. Ms Freestone: It is not just about chasing losses, gambling fills an individual's needs, and people who might be gambling to escape, who are the classic fruit machine gamblers for example, tend to be very isolated and insular. All of a sudden they find a really thrilling escape - and, hey, we would all go for it - and they want to do it more and more because it blocks the pain, it gives them a buzz and it fulfils lots and lots and lots of needs and purposes for them. Q1388 Viscount Falkland: There is quite a lot of pain in a Slot Machine Exhibition, I can tell you. Mr Scarfe: Gambling is quite a complex activity, it is an interaction between vulnerability factors on the part of the person who plays and the structural characteristics of the games, and I would say that the introduction of the FOBTs in the last year or so and the actual structural characteristics are themselves addictive. Q1389 Dr Pugh: To come back to the issue of the new class of problem gamblers, there is something called co-morbidity, the suggestion that when people are involved with problem gambling if it was not the gambling it would be something else like drugs or alcohol because the problem is with their personality not with the pursuit, if I can put it like that. Are there any new gamblers who do not show that co-morbidity and actually it is the gambling itself which has done it? Mr Scarfe: I think there are inherent characteristics of gambling which are themselves addictive and should be treated with respect. I think there is an interrelationship between certain people who have vulnerabilities and are predisposed to perhaps become addicted to gambling and the actual medium in which they gamble. Going back to the question, what has happened is that not only have we seen an increase in the prevalence of problem gambling but we have seen an increase in the complexity of problem gambling. There are now people who are gambling not just on one or two modes but several modes, which actually makes the provision of treatment quite a lot more complicated. Going back to the FOBTs, there are structural characteristics like there are with slot machines which do attract people to get addicted quite quickly to these machines. Q1390 Lord Walpole: Do you think the Gambling Bill itself will lead to an increase in problem gambling levels in the UK? If so, and I am sure you do, what are the main causes? Mr Cox: The Bill will enable the industry to attract more people to gambling events, and they will be going to venues perhaps in the future where their intention was not to gamble in the first place, they would be going there for leisure or entertainment but they may well be attracted. An increase in machines will be a likely cause of increased problems, and more FOBTs in particular could be an issue. Remote gambling is bound to grow and I think technology will develop in the future as well to provide greater opportunities. Q1391 Lord Walpole: Do you think there are any extra controls which could be included in the Bill to prevent or limit the increase in problem gambling? If so, what are they? Mr Cox: We talked earlier this afternoon about social responsibility. I think an extra control would be to ensure demonstrable social responsibility becomes part of the licence applications procedure. In other words, operators should have to prove they are running effective socially responsible practices, and clearly an independent body like GamCare or others could help in developing good socially responsible practices for them. They need that independent check I think before licences are certainly renewed. Q1392 Lord Walpole: How essential will it be to monitor the impact of these changes introduced by the Bill? How can it best be done and by whom? Mr Cox: A prevalence study both now and at an agreed time after the Bill has been in place would be appropriate. A study now would create a benchmark to cover more recent developments like FOBTs and remote gambling which were not in the last study, and after the Bill has been put in place a further study would provide a chance to see if there are any repercussions post the expected casino developments. Q1393 Lord Walpole: Who is going to do that? Mr Cox: It would need to be done by an independent organisation, I believe. Q1394 Lord Walpole: Funded by? Mr Cox: Funded by, I believe, the Government. Q1395 Chairman: That is more of a prevalence study in relation to the different changes? Mr Cox: Yes. Q1396 Chairman: With no disrespect to the response you have given us today, is there not really, from what you are saying, a need for more research to be done by the Trust rather than the anecdotal response that comes from you because you are demand-driven? Mr Cox: The Trust has been on a learning curve since it was started last July, and I believe it has been working on information in the past which is now quite old - the Budd Report was 1999 I believe - and the Peter Collins study has provided us with a guide, but this industry is now moving on so fast and with what is happening under this Bill is going to develop so dramatically they now need to take another look and a study should be undertaken, yes. Q1397 Chairman: Mr Jennens, you seemed to imply in one of your earlier answers that in one respect you really need this Bill to pass and yet, in another respect, when it does it will open up these further opportunities. You have expressed your concern about FOBTs, one presumes from that that you have equal concerns about unlimited jackpot prize machines in casinos. Is there a sense too that the fact that internet, remote gambling, is not regulated at the moment would benefit from regulation? So, overall, are we right to be doing this and what are the safeguards which should then be built into it? Mr Jennens: We debated this at some length at GamCare yesterday, and on balance we think the problem gambler will be better served by the greater awareness of the passing of the Bill than he would by the incremental increases in gambling which will take place without any additional services if the Bill were not passed. Chairman: I anticipated your thinking correctly. That is interesting. Q1398 Lord Mancroft: When the Minister came to give evidence to us - and I do not want to misquote him - he gave me the impression in answer to one question that it was the Government's thinking that the problem gambler, as it were, would be - it is the wrong word - exported to the centres, ie to the new casinos, and that the problem gamblers would be focused on these new places, the big casinos where the new opportunities were available, and not as it were spread about by the other changes which are going to be in the Bill, which presumably is remote gambling and other de-regulation. Do you think that is right or wrong? Mr Jennens: I do not think it is right. As estate agents say, location, location, location, is of great importance, and the convenience of ambient gambling is a far greater threat than a regulated and well-regulated for example resort casino. When I say "resort" I refer to somewhere where a dedicated trip would have to be made to gamble rather than strolling down the high street to six large casinos. This is not a knocking Blackpool argument, they will make their own arrangements, but it is really location which is of primary importance and the ease with which people can get at the source of their addiction. Q1399 Lord Wade of Chorlton: How do you respond to the findings of the Trust's first quarterly review of your services? Mr Jennens: Yes. There was a meeting between the trustees of the Gambling Industry Charitable Trust and GamCare just over two months ago when it was agreed that the issue of the telephone helpline, which was a highlighted weakness of GamCare, would not be raised, and it is unfortunate that the submission which was prior to the arrival of Sir David Durie has been made. I would say there are a wide variety of other services which GamCare provide very successfully which have not been highlighted. What can be done to address this? It was Professor Collins in his researches on the Board of the Trust who highlighted the weaknesses, which we freely admit, of the telephone helpline, and it is he who now has the problem of resolving them, and the Board of Trustees has every confidence he will do that and do that quickly. That is now the Board of the Responsibility in Gambling Trust. Ms Freestone: Very short and sweet: we can only respond positively to the findings of the Trust's quarterly review because until I opened my mouth this afternoon they had not identified any weaknesses. Q1400 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Chairman, could I ask one question which I asked right at the end of the previous witnesses? How would you judge your relationship with the Trust on a scale of 1 to 10? Ms Freestone: I can only answer for Gordon House and I would say it would have to be 9 to 10. Our dealings so far have given us no problems. Mr Jennens: I would like to take it under advisement until such time we have bedded down with the new chairman. Q1401 Baroness Golding: Have direct contributions from the industry reduced since the Trust has been set up? Should businesses be encouraged to contribute to the Trust, even if this is at the expense of directly funding service providers like yourselves? Mr Jennens: The answer is yes, obviously direct contributions have, as of now, completely dried up because it seems to be Government policy to make it almost obligatory to send funds direct to the Responsibility in Gambling Trust, as it now is. With Camelot, for example, who used to contribute £50,000 a year to us, now, as you have heard this morning, they are contributing direct to RIGT. Sky, who were contributing £45,000 a year to us, were under extreme pressure and they now send it direct to RIGT. Sky also used to give us approximately £120,000-worth of other services - training videos, et cetera - which are now somewhat up in the air. It does concern us because there is no guarantee RIGT will give all this to us, and we are concerned for our own future. Q1402 Baroness Golding: The quarterly review, as Lord Wade implied, seems to imply all we need is a better quality of problem gambler, who can be sorted out more quickly and according to a programme, to enable you to have the money. Does this worry you, or have I got it wrong? Mr Jennens: To enable us to have the money? Q1403 Baroness Golding: Yes, to enable you to have the money from the Trust. Mr Cox: To be frank, what is probably more important for the Trust than the sum of money we might be talking about is actually a longer term commitment. No matter what you have, if you have only one year, what can you do to develop resources, put in technology, whatever you might need, to deal with the problem gamblers you need to communicate with? You have to develop staff in any organisation to provide the best service for the gamblers. What do you do if, on a one-year basis, after six months you still do not know whether the funds are going to come in? It is impossible to plan ahead. That has been the difficulty. Q1404 Lord Mancroft: But is that not the problem throughout the voluntary sector? I do not know of any service provider in any area of the voluntary sector who knows where their next year's money comes from. You occasionally get a two or three year grant but they come in dribs and drabs. I do not know of any service provider. Mr Cox: But we are going to move in the future to have one provider of funds to us, and that is really an uneasy situation. I think, after having discussions with David Durie, we are going to have a very positive relationship as we move forward. I think the, as it is now called, RIGT's mission is very much in line with ours, so we are going to be singing from the same hymn sheet I am absolutely sure from now on, but it is important we do have I think a longer term commitment, that at least we should know one year ahead, or at least two, so we are able to plan things for this new environment which is going to be a dramatically different environment for gambling in the future. Mr Jennens: I take entirely Lord Mancroft's point that most charities have uncertainty of funding, but if there is to be uncertainty for funding both for the Trust and then in its turn GamCare, there becomes an awfully strong argument for a levy. Actually we do not want a levy, and I do not think the Government wants to impose a levy, and I do not think the Trust wants a levy. We are all better off as we are. I cannot see, since the sums of money are so trivial, why the gaming industry cannot come up with some guarantees. I really, for the life of me, cannot, and that is the nub of it. It is a minute amount of money when you look at the gross gaming revenues which are rising shortly to £10 or £12 billion. The amount of money that the service providers get - Gordon House, GamCare, to some degree Mark Griffiths of Nottingham University, the whole package - and we are talking about less than £2 million at the present time for next year, it is not a big sum of money, and we should get it really to one side and really it should be done. Q1405 Lord Mancroft: I accept that, but for example the alcohol industry provides £6 million a year for the treatment of alcohol abuse, and many argue that the National Health Service is meant to pay for it but it does not, most of the care comes from an under-funded voluntary sector. It is always going to be awkward to be a service provider with one funder --- Mr Jennens: It is indeed, and that is the second part of the question. Q1406 Lord Mancroft: Ideally, which direction would you like it to go in? Mr Jennens: In his address to the GamCare Conference last year, Professor Collins talked about the division or separation of powers, with one arm of RIGT raising the funds and the other completely independent arm dispensing the funds, and there is an argument for that. It may be that we can work out with GamCare and Gordon House a relationship with the RIGT which makes this unnecessary, and I hope we can. That would be very much simpler for all of us. But whilst it is quite appropriate RIGT should have oversight of those funds being properly spent, it is wrong that they should micro-manage the operations of either GamCare or Gordon House, and it is wrong that they should dictate what research projects are or are not undertaken, what treatment is or is not given, and it is wrong they should forbid GamCare to advertise its services. When the industry is going to be able to advertise its services and increase its revenues, we should be able to increase demand for our services and the availability of them. If people do not know we exist, we cannot fulfil their needs, and we must be able to do that. Chairman: We will take that on board. Q1407 Lord Wade of Chorlton: You are an independent charitable trust, I understand? Mr Jennens: Correct. Q1408 Lord Wade of Chorlton: So why do you only have to get your money from one source? What is stopping you getting your money from any other source? Mr Jennens: Because unfortunately Government pressure has been exerted on all the players in the game to contribute their money directly to the Gambling Industry Charitable Trust. Q1409 Lord Wade of Chorlton: Yes, but I do not understand what is stopping you raising money from other sources. Why do you just depend on the Trust to provide you with money? Mr Jennens: We did not, before the existence of the Trust we raised our money from individual members of the gambling industry ---- Q1410 Lord Wade of Chorlton: Exactly. That is still open to you. The only source of money need not necessarily be the gambling industry. I have been involved in many, many charitable fund-raising activities --- Mr Jennens: Me too. Q1411 Lord Wade of Chorlton: --- and the whole trick of fund-raising is asking for money from the people you did not think were going to give it to you. It is! You can always get money from the people you expected to give, it is getting money from people you did not expect which is important! You have to have a team of people with the skills to go and get the money. I know it is very nice if you can have one single source of money you can talk to, and that suits your arrangement, but I am still asking you, is there anything to stop you raising money yourselves from other sources if the Gambling Trust is not giving you enough? Mr Jennens: No, there is not, and we do, in that we provide training services for members of the industry. In terms of raising money outside the gambling industry, it has been our experience over the few years we have been in operation, that when it comes to starving children and fluffy animals, problem gamblers come a very, very poor third. It is not an easy thing to do, to raise money for problem gamblers in any other field of activity. We do believe it is appropriate for this to be a case of the polluter pays, and we think the money should come from the gambling industry. This brings us on to the next question, it is a question of enlightened self-interest for the gambling industry to pay the money. Ms Freestone: I take your point because we actually only receive a minority of our funding from the RIGT, as of today, but our problems are the same because we need to have some security. If you are going for matched funding you have to come up with the 8 or 9 per cent to get the other 91 per cent. If you have good, trained staff who are specialists in dealing with gambling problems, yes, we can go for year on year contracts, but I have been in the position where I have worked for half salary for three months because I believed in what I did, and I do not think that is fair in the climate of today, when it is such a tiny amount of money compared to the amount of money gained from gambling. We are all forced into the same position; whether, like GamCare, all of your money comes that way or whether, like Gordon House, it is only 8 or 9 per cent of our income, it equates to the same thing for us. Q1412 Baroness Golding: The other problem is, if you pay the Trust for quarterly reviews, for a couple of quarters in the round they may be looking at how much money they are going to give you and you have not got the right quality of problem gambler to speed them through. Mr Jennens: I do not quite understand the question. Q1413 Chairman: I think what Baroness Golding is suggesting is, if you end up having to treat particularly difficult problem gamblers there is an implication perhaps in the quarterly review that you may not have dealt with them or reformed them quickly enough. Mr Jennens: If it is a matter of number-crunching, but our concern is with outcomes and not with number-crunching. Chairman: I understand that. Q1414 Lord Walpole: If the number of problem gamblers in the country increases by the amount we all think it will, would both organisations think of setting up branches in, say, Birmingham or Newcastle? Ms Freestone: We have got them there. Q1415 Lord Walpole: This is not going to take more money out of the Trust, is it? There are not going to be separate organisations all over the country dealing with gamblers, are there? Mr Jennens: No, but there will be linkage with organisations which fund other counselling services. Q1416 Lord Walpole: Will they be looking for money from the same Trust? Mr Jennens: No. Q1417 Lord Walpole: They will not? Mr Jennens: No. Q1418 Lord Walpole: Right. At least that is some relief, is it not? Mr Cox: At the moment our organisation is such that we do have partner organisations in, say, Newcastle - the North East Council Against Addictions. This is a specialist organisation which has qualified counsellors dealing with addictions already, and we, GamCare, train their counsellors on understanding gambling issues - the hidden addiction which was raised this morning - an addiction of substance and there is a counselling technique required. We train NECAA counsellors to deal with people in their community locally, so if we get a call on our national helpline from Newcastle and someone says, "Thank you, that's a really good start, now I want to see someone", we can refer to someone in Newcastle to help. There is a cost to that and we have to pay for that training. Q1419 Lord Walpole: You have to pay for the training but not for them seeing them? Mr Cox: Yes, we do. We do at the moment. What I want to move on to hopefully in the future is ways of looking at that and sharing that cost with local communities. At the moment we have set up all these organisations and the only way we can do it is to get people started because their funds for their local activity are pre-dedicated to alcohol and drugs. Q1420 Lord Walpole: Is that main problem in London or is it not in London? Ms Freestone: There is a geographical migration to bigger cities, particularly when you are homeless, but the problem is nationwide. The statistical information I have been keeping for the last three years looks at which regions of the country applicants come from - everywhere. Yes, they will gravitate to the big cities particularly when they are homeless, particularly when they are hungry, particularly if they turn to street crime to continue to fund their gambling because when they are devoid of legitimate means they will seek illegitimate means to gamble, so you will tend to get more people showing up in London, or more people showing up in London postal districts. But our very presence in Dudley in the West Midlands has caused a blip because once you are known about more people in the region will come looking. It is a nationwide problem. Chairman: Let's see what we can do about prevention. Alan Meale. Q1421 Mr Meale: Setting aside financial support for the animals and starving children, can you have a look at the industry and give us some advice about how it can be encouraged to do more in terms of responsible practices to help tackle problem gambling? Mr Jennens: In terms of more responsible practices? Q1422 Chairman: Try and limit the damage before it occurs. Mr Jennens: I think I might quote our Prime Minister; education, education, education. That is the way and that is what we want to do and that is also part of the now RIGT's mission statement. We need to teach people gambling is not going to resolve all their problems. Fun can be had through gambling, but it is not a way out of anything, and it is addictive. If we educate people then all will be well but we need to budget for education and we need to be able to deliver it. Q1423 Mr Meale: You are saying the industry should provide that education? Mr Jennens: Absolutely, and we are delighted to help them with it and do. There are many members of the industry which are extremely responsible and with whom we have quite extensive training programmes. Ms Freestone: Quite simply, keep children out. The majority of addicts who come to us start gambling, particularly fruit machine gamblers, very early in life, between the ages of 8 and 12 years. While I concur with education, education, education, if those children are in the fruit machine arcades, they are not in school, they are not going to get the education. If we could keep the children out - we do not let them drink at 8 years old, we do not encourage them to be in places where they can use illegal substances and yet we are alone as a jurisdiction which still permits our children into gambling venues. If the industry really wants to go down the socially responsible road, keep children out. Q1424 Mr Meale: Mr Cox, you mentioned credit card companies, banks, problems with remote gambling sites and betting exchanges, but other than that what more could be done by the regulators and by the Government to limit the damage which gambling causes to people's lives and to address the damage? Mr Cox: It is by applying this Bill rigorously and allowing it to be a leisure-entertainment environment but at the same time making certain the industry does exercise its duty of care. That is what we do in our training sessions with industry, we say that it is the responsibility of a gambler over 18 whether he gambles or not, but the provider of those services has a responsibility and duty of care. Does that organisation understand what they are providing, do they promote the risks, the opportunities of winning or not, do they have staff who understand how to see people who might be stressed and so on, do they have self-exclusion policies in place where a problem gambler can say, "I do not want to come here again, please help me." All these things have to go through. It is particularly important in the future I think with an expanded industry, because you are going to get a lot of novice staff in this expanded industry dealing with a lot of novice gamblers. Q1425 Mr Meale: The reason I ask that is because, apart from regulations on all these other things like credit card companies and banks, the main thing we have had evidence on from people in this industry is that you should place limits, absolute limits, where people can get to in debt and then they can handle it. What about people getting counselling and so on? Could we not build that into the system so there could be some mechanism of support before people hit those limits? What I am saying is that it is not satisfactory for us to have one policy which is, you hit the button and that is it, no more. Mr Cox: I want to work very closely with the FSA and banks on this in particular because young people these days can get debit cards quite quickly. You may be 16 and you cannot gamble but you can get a debit card - you can be working and, why not, you are entitled to it - but there is no code in there when they can go into a potential gambling site which picks up that they are 16. This needs to be done. There can be some protective measures which I would like to see developed. Q1426 Mr Meale: Credit cards, pin numbers, all these other new technologies are here now and are really old hat, but there is a whole range of new technology which is coming in very soon. Are you doing research to gather information on these areas before it comes in so you can help people who get trapped by it? Mr Cox: We are working with the likes of Vodafone, Orange, on this sort of thing, given that they have mobile technology as well. We are working with BSkyB who have interactive television. So we do understand these things, it is a learning curve and we are learning together and we are always putting the problem gambler at the top of the agenda in any discussion. Q1427 Mr Meale: Do you think it would be a good area of research to undertake? Mr Cox: Yes, it could be, but do bear in mind it is a fast changing area. You might research it but by the time the research is out, it is out of date, or could be. Q1428 Lord Mancroft: Do you recognise the distinction between "problem" and "pathological" gambling? Do you think it is semantic or is it a distinction which has any value particularly in therapeutic terms? Mr Scarfe: I certainly do recognise the distinction and I think it is a very important one on lots of different levels. I also recognise in certain academic fields the term "pathological" is the only recognised aspect of gambling. But you can understand, as I am sure you have been told by other people who have contributed to this Committee, that gambling exists on a spectrum, it is not homogeneous, it is heterogeneous, it is quite a complex issue, and therefore to make a distinction between those who have a pathological addiction, ie a very severe addiction which they are unable to overcome, and those who are on the cusp, as I would put it, between being, shall we say, social, regular gamblers and developing a problem, is a very important one. I think it is important for clinicians like myself and for the services which Gordon House and ourselves provide because it would enable us, if you like, to go back to what Baroness Golding said just now, if we also saw a slightly better class of gambler, in the sense it is someone who is just developing the problem, we could actually work much more effectively short-term. The reality is an awful lot of the clients, in fact the majority of clients, are towards the severe end. So I think it is a very important distinction to make. It is a very important distinction to make in terms of what was just being said, because so much targeting in terms of actual prevention and education is targeted at the pathological side, whereas I would like to see it targeted at the problem side. For example, if we went down the route - and I am not sure if it would be appropriate - of having warning signs in gambling venues and on various machines and forms of gambling, if you are a pathological, compulsive gambler, you are going to ignore those anyway. It is like a smoker who picks up a packet of cigarettes and looks at the health warning and thinks, "It is not going to affect me, I have been smoking 20 years anyway, I will ignore it", but the person who is just about to pick up the packet of cigarettes for the first time, or someone who is about to embark on gambling, and has suddenly found themselves beginning to get that little level of preoccupation, that little bit more concern about their gambling, perhaps losing more than they should, those warning signs could be quite effective. I think it is a very important way of targeting some of the very scarce resources we have. So for me it is a very important distinction and I think one that can certainly inform on lots of different levels. Ms Freestone: I can only agree with what Adrian says, and we quite freely embrace the concept of referring between services to get to the right level. We would not, and could not - and it would be inappropriate for us to - take in a problem gambler rather than somebody who is at the most extreme end of the scale. Our big problem then is that it is such a geographical scattergun approach to treatment in this country, if they do not live in the right place, where do we refer them? We can refer them back to the helpline but there are gaps in the middle which we still need to fill. Whilst we embrace the concept and we all work on the spectrum of treatment, if we continue to have great gaps in places we are never going to meet the need properly. Q1429 Mr Wright: We have received some evidence which expressed concerns about allowing AWP machines in non-specific venues such as cafés, especially when they are accessible by children. How many calls do you receive about under-18s with gambling problems and what forms of gambling do they identify? Ms Freestone: None, because we cannot deal with under-18s. We have not got the money for the treatment. It is very different treatment for adolescents, so we only deal with over-18s. Q1430 Mr Wright: So no parent has phoned you up and said, "My child has a problem"? Ms Freestone: We would have to refer them back to GamCare. Mr Cox: We do get calls from parents and relatives of under-18s. We received something like 150 calls in 2003 - I checked before I came out. The major problem by a long way was fruit machines. For the very young, say between 10 and 14, they seem to gamble on fruit machines in places like chip shops, kebab shops, launderettes, et cetera, which are too easily accessible for young people like that, they are often quite near to schools and I would like to see that addressed. Q1431 Mr Wright: What proportion would actually be having a problem with amusement arcades? Mr Cox: I said 150. Most of them should not be able to get into proper amusement arcades because they are under 18. In our statistics which I have seen so far in 2003, very, very few have been able to get in. Q1432 Mr Wright: I was interested in Ms Freestone's comments when she said, "Don't allow kids into amusement arcades" --- Ms Freestone: It is the seaside amusement arcades. Most of us, if we have a pleasurable experience, want to repeat it, so we take small children on a family holiday up to Blackpool, into the arcades, they have cafés and ball parks and things there, you put your children in there and they play about while you play the machines, and those memories stay there and it is then about the psychological processes. Unless we make gambling the liver or the kippers or whatever a child hates to eat, they will want to go back to it because they associate it with family, with holidays, with pleasure, and so we need to keep them out so they do not get those early memories. Q1433 Mr Wright: I come from a seaside resort and invariably, I would have to say, a child going on holiday with its parents for a week, the amount of time they would go into the arcade in one week out of that particular year, would not create that much of a problem. Ms Freestone: Not at that point in time, but I go back to a question which was asked not of us but earlier today about, "Can't we spot problem gamblers?" If we could spot them at 8, we could save them at 18. We do not know what that experience does but what we do know is of those who become severely addicted gamblers, particularly fruit machine gamblers, they will start gambling early, they will retain those early pleasurable experiences and when things get rough they want to do it again. Only 10.9 per cent of our resident group over the three years have been over the age of 18 when they started to gamble, more than a third have been aged 8 to 12. We do not know what that early experience does to them, but what we would not do is sit our 8 year old child in the middle of a pub and give it a bottle of vodka and see if it becomes an alcoholic in ten years' time. Q1434 Mr Wright: That particular scenario may well happen, and when we talk about the laws in terms of alcohol that may be something which needs to be looked at, because that is confusing as well. One of the other comments you made was in relation to absenteeism from school and truancy. When they did a sweep in my particular seaside resort, 77 children were found to be absent from school and caught by the police but not one was in an amusement arcade. BACTA has what they consider to be a considered approach to this on the basis of not allowing children into amusement arcades. Ms Freestone: Yes, I hope it works but what I am saying is, I cannot understand why we are playing about with it. I think the big mistake we are making is on the amount of money, that a £5 stake is going to keep them safe. When I was 8 a fiver was a fortune - okay, I am getting old now - but it is the process, it is the winning, the experience, and I really cannot understand, however responsible the industry is, why they are not being asked to police this. We as a society should be policing this if we are care about future generations of addicted gamblers. Q1435 Chairman: But there is no research, is there, which gives any indication as to what percentage or proportion of children who may play on amusement-type machines, category D machines in amusement arcades, in the long run have the kind of problem gambling you suggest? Given the tens of thousands of children who do play on them, presumably it can only be a small proportion who end up with a problem in later life. Does this not show the urgency of the need for more research in this area? Ms Freestone: I agree with you, but what we do know from the statistics we keep is that as age of onset increases, the percentage of people who come for treatment in later life decreases. If you start young, you are in treatment earlier and you are more likely to be carrying it on in later life. Q1436 Chairman: The Budd Report clearly stated that ambient gambling, such as in cafés, fish and chip shops, taxi places and so on, should be stopped. Ms Freestone: Yes. Q1437 Chairman: The Government decided they did not agree. Who in your opinion is right? Ms Freestone: Budd. Mr Cox: Budd. Q1438 Viscount Falkland: I happen to agree with what Faith Freestone is saying, almost in every respect with what she has been saying, but the Minister does not agree with it. The Minister has said it would take a lot of persuading for him to consider changing the cultural business of children going into amusement arcades, as they have done for as long as most of us can remember. Can you give us some practical idea of how we can persuade him and the Government that this is so, apart from the anecdotal? Ms Freestone: I can because, with respect, we remain the only jurisdiction in the world which allows our children to gamble. Earlier I heard it said that a meaningful way of spending money which is being raised, and even possibly by a levy, is to trawl overseas research to find out what it can tell the British experience. With respect, we can trawl every bit of overseas research in the world, but we are the ones who know what it is doing to our children, and in this we are really getting it wrong; we are really getting it wrong. The rest of the world can see it; we are standing out alone here now. Q1439 Jeff Ennis: We do not have the highest rate of problem gamblers in the world, so to some extent that contradicts the point you have just made. My question to you is, how does one person's gambling problems impact on others round them? What can be done to support those indirectly affected by problem‑gambling?Error! Bookmark not defined. Mr Scarfe: I think it is very clear that the impact of problem‑gambling on relatives, partners, friends and family members is very high. The way that I look at it is that problem‑gambling is known as the hidden addition and sadly this is the hidden side of the hidden addition. For virtually everybody that comes to GamCare for treatment it has an impact somewhere along the line on their relationships, it has an impact somewhere along the line on their physical and psychological health. When someone comes in for treatment we monitor that at assessment and we monitor it at closure as well. We can actually see very clearly that it is not just an impact on family members, there is an impact on a whole range of people, people, for example, who may well be at work, friends and colleague, the impact on businesses, the impact on the wider social network, and so on. What can be done? For me it is absolutely essential that support and counselling should be available for family members as well. Everybody here sees me jumping up and down about £10 million coming our way, I would say that one of things that does need to be spent on is family support and family counselling because the impact is great. When we train with other people, either in the industry or with health care professionals, we often quote that it can be as much as up to 15 other people that can be affected by one gambler, it is very much a ripple effect and we have seen that on our help‑line and in our services as well. Ms Freestone: I think the other thing we must remember is that the impact that they have is far greater because the body does not stop being an addicted gambler. If you inject a substance at some point you fall down or pass out. The devastation that can be caused and the impact that it has, particularly on children, who are the ones that are having to hide daily from the money lenders who are knocking on the door, who are the ones going round to the shops because Mum or Dad cannot go out because they are frightened of people, who are the ones who are not eating properly or are not going to school because all their routine has gone. A gambler can perpetuate for years and years and years and damage an awful lot of people before the problem even comes to light. I think the impact on the family is particularly important. Mr Scarfe: I would like to add one other thing, if I may, going back to what we were saying earlier on about the distinction between problem and pathological, often the stereotype view is that it is only the pathological gambler that has the actual impact. In my experience that is not true. Someone who develops a gambling problem, even if it is over a relatively short space of time and not as severe as someone at the pathological end the impact can be great, certainly in the short‑term. There will certainly be an impact on their family relations and there is likely to be an impact in terms of very quickly accumulating debt, there is certainly going to be an impact in terms of their psychological health. Again I want to emphasise it is important to see gambling as a spectrum and not simply the rather stereotypical image of the pathological and everything is okay. Q1440 Jeff Ennis: Do you think if we could provide more support mechanism and counselling to family members that might actually speed up the process of getting over the addiction in the first place? Mr Scarfe: Very clearly I do. I can illustrate that, let us just take a hypothetical example, but a real one in a sense, if I was working with a gambler and one of the things that person was actually struggling with was to be honest with his partner or with his family member, so thinking it is a good thing I encourage them to go home but the partner then responds and says, "you should not do it anyway, you are stupid, you know you are going to lose, you are stupid, I will not listen", then the impact on that person is going to be quite devastating. If on the other hand we have a support mechanism, a counselling mechanism, an educational mechanism for family members that enables them to try and understand what gambling is about it makes the treatment so much more effective as well, let alone supporting the people. I could go on, you will have to stop me, about this for a long time. When we get family members or partners coming in they often find it much more difficult to express themselves because they think they are going to be seen as simply moaners, not understanding, "what have you got to be upset about it is your partner that has the problem, not you". It is often very difficult for them to come for treatment. Chairman: We are going to move on to treatment now. Q1441 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: We had evidence from Dr Moran earlier in our sessions and he subsequently sent us a paper which includes a comment from a document called Interventions for Pathological Gambling which is from the prestigious Cochrane Library. The conclusion of that was, "this systematic review revealed a lack of evidence for the effective treatment of pathological gambling". Mr Scarfe: Do you want me to respond? Q1442 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Yes. Mr Scarfe: I thought you might. I do not know the context and I have not read the context. What I would obviously have to say, and the experience I have to verify it, is that good quality counselling treatment, properly carried out, monitored using cost‑effective treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy which is evidence‑based, supported by an ability to help the client understand what may well be driving the gambling is in fact very effective. When the Committee did come to GamCare you met a couple of clients who had been through the process they were some of last year's 78% success rate which we had. I certainly want to say there is a lot of evidence to show that gambling can be treated properly and sustained even at follow‑up, up to six months, a year, 18 months to two years on. There is also research done at the moment by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy that has looked into the cost‑effectiveness of counselling in comparison to primary care treatment and they have come out and said not only can counselling treatment be effective, and this is generic, not specifically on gambling, but it can be cost‑effective, which is often the thing that is thrown at counselling, which is that it is a very expensive form of treatment, I actually do not think that it is. When you think of the impact that one gambler may have on up to 15 others if you are going to not just deal with that person but the impact on the family will be beneficial, on their psychological health will be beneficial, on their physical health, and so on, will be beneficial. I would want to argue with Dr Moran's view. Q1443 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Thank you. Can I put a similar question to Faith Freestone about Gordon House, how effective is residential treatment? Ms Freestone: We only deal with the severe end of the spectrum. In one sense I totally disagree with Dr Moran's view but I can also go a bit further the other way, if Dr Moran is only talking about dealing with the gambling bit per se then the whole thing is going to fall flat on its face. For people who come for residential treatment we are dealing with the psychological, social and economic costs and effects of their gambling, it is a holistic approach, it is a whole person approach. We are the intensive care end, if you like, if we then send people out there without aftercare we are almost setting them up to fail. It is, as Adrian said, the right level of intervention, properly and cost‑effectively delivered but with a follow‑up approach that allows people the aftercare that they need, which is what our outreach service is about, particularly via our internet site and our telephone councillors. Q1444 Lord Mancroft: GamCare's submission refers to a need to spend money on creating public awareness of help services, how are your services currently advised? What more could be done to raise public awareness? Mr Cox: In an industry that is going to be more attractive to the United Kingdom public, offering a wide range of gambling services it must be right that the public are made aware of help services as well. We do not have funds to spend on media advertising, if we did we most certainly advertise our help‑line. We pay for entries in telephone directories, we have leaflets available in outlets like betting shops, we write articles for newspapers and magazines when we can, when we are asked to appear on radio and TV we do, invariably when this happens we get a surge of callers so we know what publicity does. We do need to spend on media advertising. I would say that we need to spend something in the region of £1.5 to £2 million per annum, there is no point in spending it one year and not the next, you have to have a continuous process to pull together a co‑ordinated media strategy and plan. I would allocate most of these funds probably to local radio and transport advertising, like the Underground and buses. We have developed our website over the last few months and it now receives between 7,000 and 8,000 hits per month. I have made a note for myself to see what we did in January, 9,500 in January. We are in contact more and more but we are using our own means to do it, we do not advertise. Q1445 Chairman: Who should pay for that £1.5 to £2 million? Mr Cox: It should come from the industry. The industry are paying into RIGT and it should come from there. Q1446 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Have you asked the RIGT for an advertising budget and been turned down? Mr Jennens: We have asked, yes, but that may change under the new name. Q1447 Janet Anderson: You may have heard in the earlier exchange with the Trust I said to them if they had additional funding was there anything that they would do that they could not do now, we talked particularly about raising awareness as well as problem‑gambling and they seemed to say ‑ and forgive me if I misinterpreted their response ‑ they had enough money and they did not want more. You seem to be saying something quite different. Mr Jennens: That is true. Mr Cox: I got the impression from the evidence submitted earlier they were talking about raising their own awareness. Q1448 Janet Anderson: Right. Mr Cox: What we are talking about is raising our awareness as a service provider to the public. Q1449 Janet Anderson: You still fundamentally disagree with them in that you think there is insufficient money coming in from the industry whereas they think there is. Mr Jennens: I think that is probably the case, yes. Q1450 Lord Walpole: I know we have not got as far as adverts for gambling yet but when we do do you think it would be helpful to have information as to where problem gamblers can get help? I did rather wonder whether machines should not be covered with suitable remarks, including your telephone number, in casinos, that sort of thing. I would like all fruit machines to have telephone number on them frankly and various other pieces of equipment as well. Mr Jennens: We would like that too. Mr Cox: To be fair we work with industry on social training matters and they do have our leaflets available in outlets, that is a start. If we are talking about proper advertising of course if the industry starts to advertise in a major way it would be helpful if our information is on their adverts as well, as long as it does not become so small you need a pair of binoculars to read it. Mr Scarfe: If I may also say, I think that is very true, once a person has developed a problem it is very important to sign‑post those places like ourselves and others that can help them. I also think in one sense that is again being reactive, you are actually helping someone who has got past a particular point and needs help. What I would like to see and what would be a much more proactive stance is educating people about some of the characteristics and dangers of gambling, particularly for certain vulnerable groups. We know, and I assume you have had evidence about certain risk groups, not just the young and vulnerable but those that suffer from depression but those that find it difficult to cope with stress and those with mental health issues, and so on. It would be really nice, if money was money was made available, to be more proactive so that people understand the mechanism of gambling. It is sold as entertainment and I think that is okay, it is sold as something that is socially acceptable, and I think that is okay but it does need to be treated with respect. There are inherent characteristics of gambling that I think the public at large and the people who market it do not fully understand. That would be a much more proactive thing rather than just helping people who have already developed a problem. Q1451 Mr Meale: Following on from that, proactive and vulnerable groups, do you think that problem‑gambling should be treated as a public health problem? We have programmes for drug addiction, alcohol addiction and smoking addiction ‑ even cannabis is marketed as one of the elements of treatment for change ‑ what do you think about that concept? Mr Scarfe: For a long time we have banging our head a little bit against the Department of Health doors and not getting a lot of response or a polite English one, "do not call us, we will call you". I think it really does have public health implications. I think there is very clear evidence for that. What I would want to say is that the voluntary sector is doing a very, very good job. We actually deal with a whole range of people who have gambling problems, from the problem to the more severe to the pathological to those who have no support. I think one of the vulnerable groups, and it may not be mentioned much, is people who have mental health issues. I think there are very clear links between people who are suffering from mental health issues, ADHD issues that the voluntary sector is not equipped to work with. I am a psychotherapist and I have psychotherapists working with me but I would value working alongside the NHS and using their expertise in the areas of mental health, and so on, which I think would be a very, very good collaborative approach. Q1452 Mr Meale: If we could get that ‑ bearing in mind the trust which we spoke to earlier said that the only time it had any kind of linkage was when it was involved in a project in Sheffield many years ago and then they withdrew the funding ‑ do you not think it is a prime area for research to be done to show there is a linkage on that and there should be a link between the two sides? Mr Scarfe: I would value it greatly. I do not think we could move everything into the NHS, I do not think that would serve either the NHS or the problem gamblers because I think it is a collaborative thing. I would certainly value working along side the NHS and I would certainly value it being seen as a public health issue. Ms Freestone: On the second point first, we have a letter on file from the NHS that goes back to 1997 and they said the NHS felt that they should fund Gordon House Association and work with Gordon House Association but did not feel they could afford to do so as it would open a floodgate and they would have to work with others on a lot of other behavioural problems. Like Adrian I have worked with schizophrenics and have worked very successfully with a mental health team but it created problems with funding issues from particular regions, it is getting that partnership working. For me gambling is a public health problem but firstly before we get to involvement lets go for recognition. The number of general practitioners who misdiagnose or cannot sign somebody off work with a medical certificate with depression or some other problem; they put them on Prozac or put them on tranquillisers they are not depressed, they are suffering from gambling addiction. What we continue to do is we continue to collude in hiding the problem because general practitioners do not refer on. Q1453 Mr Meale: Would it be possible to have a copy of this letter you got from the NHS for our notes. Ms Freestone: I believe it would, yes. Q1454 Chairman: I think most colleagues would know that mental health is often referred to as the Cinderella service of the National Health Service, a comment that has obviously passed you as well. From what you are saying it does seem something of an anomaly that Government can contribute massively to the cost of an advertising campaign in relation to, for example, tobacco and you are saying that the problem of gambling would be reduced if there was a much smaller advertising campaign. I am quite sure that £1.5‑£2 million is a lot less than the cost of an advertising campaign that we can all see at the moment. Mr Scarfe: The Government does still seem to define addiction in terms of substance abuse as opposed to behavioural and psychological addiction. Ms Freestone: Even if you look at education courses, if you take addiction studies in colleges or mainstream education establishments it is substance based. While we continue to do that we are not educating tomorrow's professionals to recognise the symptoms of gambling addiction or work with those or treat it, and while we do that we are still not there. Q1455 Mr Meale: Can I comment on that, it is not entirely true, in the National Health Service there are a whole range of services which are about addictions which are psychiatric and so there has been recognition but the points you made are very, very valid and we should perhaps reinforce them in our report. Chairman: It has been a long afternoon and there are two or three questions about regulation that, if I may, I will address to you in writing. You have actually alluded to a number of the points already in your answers. Can I thank you all very much for coming today and for the clarity of your answers, it has been very helpful. |