The expanding casino estate

The only “new” gambling to be permitted under the Gambling Act 2005 consists of 17 new casinos, comprising one regional casino, eight large casinos and eight small casinos. Approximately 3% of the total gamble of the £53bn in 2005 in the UK was in casinos.

Churches, most notably the Methodists and The Salvation Army, have lobbied consistently against the increase in casinos and gaming machines, and particularly against the Regional Casino concept. Their published material expresses concerns that the Category A gaming machines to be placed in these are very interactive and highly addictive, enabling players to stake money rapidly and encouraging them to chase their losses, (there are currently no such machines in Britain). Others, including the Centre for the Study of Gambling at Salford University and GamCare do not share this view, seeing regional casinos as comparatively less dangerous than other more convenient forms of machine and remote gambling, if they are introduced alongside appropriate public awareness and education campaigns. Indeed, research from South Africa suggests that the number of problem gamblers across the board can be reduced, (as opposed to simply not increasing), if effective education on the dangers and how to avoid them is provided at the same time as opening a big casino. This education is most effective when fully integrated into the curriculum and includes information on what gambling is, how it works and the fact that in the long term you will lose.



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The Internet and Interactive Gambling - new, vast and hard to control

Case Study
In April 2005, a 25 year old from Brechin used the computer at his family home to access internet gambling sites while his parents were away. Using their credit cards he created 13 accounts by typing in the numbers which he had got from his parents' bank statements. He won £90,000 in the first hour, but continued to bet and started losing money. In a desperate attempt to recover, he kept gambling, not only losing his winnings, but ending up £68,000 in debt. When he realised the extent of his gambling he took about 170 painkillers and cut his wrists.

Internet gambling is, essentially, using the internet to place bets, through credit, on casino games, sports games, or whatever the particular “casino” offers. Wins or losses are paid or collected accordingly. Until recently it was thought that about one million people in Britain gambled regularly online, (representing about a third of the 3.3m across the whole of Europe), but more recent estimates have suggested that the UK figure could be as high as 3.8m. In Autumn 2005, GamCare, (a UK organisation which works for the provision of proper care for those who have been harmed by gambling dependency), reported the existence of 1,700 gambling websites in addition to interactive television channels and mobile phones offering gambling services. GamCare says that the average online gambling debt in 2004 was £25,676, an increase of £5,000 from the previous year.

In April 2006, online gaming site Partygaming saw its first quarter revenues rise by 54% to £193.6m following a record number of people signing up to play poker online. The number of the group’s poker players leapt by over 20% to 263,254, of which 39% were from outside the USA. Anyone using the Internet will find themselves being offered enticements to visit internet gaming sites, including starting “kitties”. The UK is seen as a hub for on-line betting. Ladbrokes has 13 foreign-language websites and William Hill has online clients in 197 countries.

Internet gambling has a number of features which make it particularly dangerous for those with a tendency to problem, or addictive, gambling. It is essentially a private activity, rather than a social one; it promotes repetitive and continuous play; it is highly available and accessible and there is relatively low public awareness of the dangers. Devoid of the traditional stigma associated with betting shops, it is perhaps not surprising that women represent an increasingly large part of the online gambling market, accounting for 30% of visits to UK sites during the World Cup.

Paradoxically, it is easier to attach safety features to online gambling than any other form of gaming. Self checking can be made easily available; patterns of play can be monitored and codes of practice enforced. However, this can only be enforced on those companies which choose to submit to regulation; and therein lies one of the most serious problems, since the particular challenge posed by the internet lies in its disrespect for territorial boundaries. The Gambling Commission cannot regulate off-shore or overseas companies, and it is very difficult to see how any real protection from these can be afforded to those who are not able or willing to protect themselves.

In the USA, Congress passed legislation which makes it illegal for banks to process online gambling transactions in an attempt to stop the money flow from this form of gambling. However, the legislation has been likened to the alcohol prohibition of the 1920s. It does not prevent Americans from gambling online, so they are still free to search for potential websites. It only prevents the companies from making credit card transactions with US citizens. The likelihood is that it will be the more "legitimate" online companies who "play by the rules" that will exit the market, while other companies will operate and thrive in the underground economy. New companies will enter the market using techniques to get around the legislation.

The UK Government is seeking international agreement on the regulation of e-gambling which would secure agreement to shared regulatory principles. However, given the potential sums to be made, some companies will always be reluctant to operate under tight regulatory structures. It seems reasonable to expect these sites to remain a persistent and pernicious feature of the online landscape.

From 2007 the UK is to be the first major country to offer online gaming licences. The Gambling Commission’s licensing and regulation of UK operators must be effective in fulfilling its three objectives. Given the enhanced protection that this is capable of offering in comparison with unregulated, off-shore sites, it is not unreasonable for the Government to encourage existing online poker and casino operators to relocate to the UK and thereby to come under the Commission’s sway. However, the Government’s motives appear at best muddled; the Council deplores the terms of the aspiration articulated by Richard Caborn, Minister in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in a memorandum to Mark Davies, Managing Director of Betfair (quoted in the Observer 27 January 2007) that, “Britain should become a world leader in the field of online gambling.” In reality, the UK tax regime is likely to be the determining factor in whether operators decide to relocate their business to this country: current wisdom suggests that the Chancellor would either have to tax the sites like any other gambling company - which would attract very few to the UK - or offer tax breaks.

A significant “carrot” in the Commission’s gift is the regulation of advertising (and the “stick”, a UK media advertising ban on offshore sites). However, the position in relation to the internet is not clear; and in any case the ban cannot be enforced in the European Economic Area, which includes offshore havens Gibraltar and Malta.



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Gambling in the UK

“The National Lottery really did turn us into a nation of gamblers. It meant that two thirds of the British population were regularly gambling. It brought women into gambling. Gambling became destigmatised.” (Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, Nottingham Trent University)

The picture of gambling in the UK is changing rapidly. Most people would recognise a description of the normalisation and commercialisation of gambling in recent years. Much of this can be traced to the change in regulatory framework, and thereafter attitudes, brought about by the advent of the Lottery in 1994. From this time, gambling became more socially acceptable than ever before, as the law changed to allow betting shops to serve food and light refreshments and to have windows open to the street. The other seismic influence has been the growth of internet and interactive gambling, as one aspect of the overall burgeoning of the internet’s impact on our lives. Given the pace and scale of change, this report is necessarily a snapshot in time which seeks to identify the main drivers of change and areas of future concern.

The regulatory framework
Legislation on gambling is reserved to Westminster and is dealt with at a UK level, although the Scottish Parliament has a role in determining the form of licensing authorities’ policy statements, and local authority licensing committees will determine whether or not to grant licenses in their local communities. Traditionally, the primary purpose of UK gambling legislation had been regulation with a view to social control, rather than economic regeneration. This differed from the approach taken to regulation in other countries. UK law said that gambling should be legal, but not stimulated, and commercial and economic interests took a secondary place in determining the nature of legislation. This changed with the National Lottery etc. Act 1993 and since then, UK legislation has sought to stimulate, rather than to discourage gambling.

The Church and Society Council of the Church of Scotland deeply regrets the fact that the effect of this has been to change the way that gambling is generally viewed in this country. We recognise the paradox that the more that an activity is “sanitised” through regulation for essentially good reasons, the more socially acceptable it becomes. However, we believe that the balance has now shifted too far in the direction of “normalisation”.

The Gambling Act of 2005 replaced most of the existing law about gambling in Great Britain. Much of what that Act does is to be welcomed, in terms of introducing a comprehensive structure of gambling regulations and greater protections for children and young people as well as bringing the internet gaming sector within British regulations for the first time. However, at least in part to satisfy commercial and economic interests, the Act allows for an increase in the number of casinos in Great Britain, currently a maximum increase of 17, including one “super” or regional casino. Almost all media attention has concentrated on this aspect of the Act, and on the one regional or “super” casino in particular, (discussed further below).

The new regulatory body for Gambling in the UK is the Gambling Commission, which came into existence on 1 October 2005. It currently regulates bingos, casinos, charitable lotteries and gaming machines. From September 2007 it will also regulate betting and remote gambling, including online, mobile phone and other non-terrestrial forms of gambling. Ultimately, it will regulate all commercial gambling except the National Lottery and spread betting. The statutory duty of the Commission is to pursue three objectives which are set out in the 2005 Act, and to permit gambling insofar as it is judged reasonably compatible with these:
- Preventing gambling from being a source of crime and disorder, being associated with crime or disorder or being used to support crime;
- Ensuring that gambling is conducted in a fair and open way;
- Protecting children and other vulnerable persons form being harmed or exploited by gambling.


Credits

The picture of gambling men was done by Johnny.ie.



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Pastoral perspective on gambling

The pastoral perspective
From the nineteenth century onwards, gambling by the poor became more prevalent, addictive, and destructive. Protestant Churches - particularly from the Reformed tradition - and bodies like The Salvation Army became increasingly opposed to gambling as they engaged with its terrible effects on the people in the slums of the newly industrialised cities. Their critique of gambling was that it was addictive; that it held out a false and destructive hope as the new “opium of the people”; that it destroyed family life, and that it plunged many into despair. John Wesley explicitly counted gambling as a means of gain inconsistent with love of neighbour.

This position has also traditionally been shared by some left-wing political groups, as expressed by Martin Bright (New Statesman, 4 September 2006):
“When I was growing up, gambling was something that distinguished my working class grandparents from my middle-class parents. The older generation saw it as a harmless flutter on the horses, while my mum and dad knew that gambling helped keep their parents poor.” The Church of Scotland has fairly consistently adopted a formal position of total opposition to gambling.



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The Christian Concern with Addiction

Britons gambled £53 billion in 2005. That figure represents a 7-fold increase in 5 years, and equates to more than £800 for every man, woman and child in the country. Thanks to the Football World Cup, the 2006 equivalent figure will certainly be higher. The turnover of Ladbrokes and William Hill rose by, respectively, 110% and 219% between 2002 and 2005. The nature, scale and regulation of gambling in the UK are changing rapidly. The most recent data on gambling prevalence are already 7-8 years old, and widely thought to be significantly out of date. Gambling participation and expenditure in Scotland tend to be higher than the national average.

The Roots of Christian concern.
Over time, Christian concerns about gambling have reflected two perspectives. Firstly, they have arisen from a theology about money and its uses and the proper stewardship of our possessions. Secondly, they have been associated with direct pastoral concerns: the problem of addiction for both addicts and their dependents; the effect on the poor; and the distortion of the values on which our society is based. Each of these perspectives is relevant to our current overview.

The theological perspective
This perspective is principally informed by a theology of money and its uses and an understanding of the nature of possessions and stewardship.

With something approaching unanimity, Scripture teaches that ownership is not absolute. We may not do anything we wish with our property, for we have been given stewardship, rather
than unconditional rights, over our belongings, our wealth, and our resources. We are accountable to God for the way we use the goods that God has entrusted to us, and God wills that they be shared and used for building up community. In a sense, this means that we hold things in common, and should not use possessions selfishly. We share for the sake of fellowship, and as a way of establishing fellowship. There is a strong thrust in the Bible and in the Christian tradition towards greater economic equality, the encouragement of fellowship through generosity and an emphasis in favour of the poor, vulnerable and marginalised.

Money is to enable market transactions, to encourage production and exchange. It is a tool, an instrument, but it does not in itself sustain life or community. Yet it easily becomes a kind of idol. The Bible in both testaments commends lending of money and of goods, as a way of helping those in need, or the relatively disadvantaged. Jesus picks up the theme of lending and radicalizes it. Lend, he says, expecting nothing in return (Luke 6.34-35). In other words, we should do daring things with our resources, but only in order to love and help our neighbours and the strangers among us, rather than for our own amusement or enrichment. This was an extension of the Old Testament ban on usury, or the taking of interest on loans. There was a strong injunction not to take interest from one’s kin or from fellow Israelites; but Jews were allowed to lend at interest to foreigners.

None the less, it is clear that lending at interest, commonly called usury, went on in the time of Jesus. Otherwise the Lord’s injunction to lend expecting nothing in return would have been pointless. In the parable of the talents, the unfaithful servant was expected by his master when he returned to have earned interest on the money with which he had been entrusted (Matthew 25.27 and Luke 19.23). Usury clearly went on, but it was generally disapproved of as exploitation of the poor, and a mean-spirited action. Of course this was all in the context of very simple economies. Yet even here, debt was of such importance that Christians all down the ages have prayed “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.The Fathers of the Church and the medieval theologians developed the opposition to usury. Usury, it was argued, is unnatural, for it is letting money “breed”, and be used in ways which are unnatural and improper. During the Reformation period, the ban on usury was quietly relaxed, particularly in Calvinist countries. According to Max Weber, R.H. Tawney and many others, this provided the context in which modern capitalism could emerge. However, there remained a strong emphasis on the virtue of frugality and a horror at luxury. Those who profited from the new markets were expected to be generous in giving to those in need, recognising that riches were given by God for the common good and not for the prodigality and selfishness or for the amusement of the few. Devout Calvinists were commonly at the forefront of efforts to develop a responsible capitalism and an accountable market.


Credits
The Photograph of the dice was taken by Marcandelariviere.


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