UK GAMING
Don’t drop the ball I
n most of my previous columns I’ve written about the gambling industry and its interrelationship with Government and politics, and just had a small end-piece on one of my personal interests, horse racing. However, this time I’m going to
start with racing, because it affects the gambling industry world-wide, and the governing body in the UK has just committed one of the worst pieces of political PR blundering I’ve seen in a long time. By the time this column appears, I hope the
Nick Hawkins is a Barrister specialising in Gambling and Leisure law. In his 13 years in Parliament previously, he held roles in Government and Opposition, including Shadow Solicitor-General and Shadow Sports Minister. He is currently Consultant Head of Gambling Law, Spring Law Solicitors, London
catastrophic decision to introduce mid-season, a week before racing’s new national showpiece day, the Champions Day, unworkable whip restrictions based on daft numerical limitations, leading to the banning of leading jockeys, will have been reversed – but this was an entirely avoidable blunder and it beggars belief, to me, that those at the top of racing should consult so little with those at the sharp end, expected to comply with new rules, and have so little understanding of the downside PR risks, especially on timing! A vast amount of money, and a year’s preparation, had gone in to creating the new Champions Day near the end of the season – best horses in top races. Blessed with wonderful Autumn sunshine and a horse (Frankel) now clearly fit to be ranked with the all-time greats, it was a huge success, on the day. The very sad matter was that the gloss was tarnished
by the fact that all the talk and lots of the coverage had to be equally about the whip rules and the long bans for top jockeys Richard Hughes and Christophe Soumillon. At top speed on a top half-ton of horse how can a top jockey judge when the exact point is after which five flicks of a whip is fine, but one more means a long ban and a significant fine? Absolute madness! Why on earth they couldn’t have had a short trial with no bans or fines, and in close consultation with top jockeys as to what is workable – and a new rule introduced only from the start of a new season, and only if and when a trial had been deemed successful, perhaps after revisions? Let’s hope some lessons are learned and that total
cock-ups like this are not repeated. Racing (as all of gambling) needs friends – there are enough enemies and kill-joys of the politically-correct type out there, without the sport turning on its own, in the full glare of media coverage. When so much good work and time and money has been put in to such campaigns as “Racing for Change”, it is heartbreaking to see such an obvious own goal scored by the “powers that be”. Turning now to some other issues in other industry
12 NOVEMBER 2011
Former two-time UK Shadow Gambling Minister Nick Hawkins sorts the wheat from the chaff in his bi-monthly column…
areas, I was personally surprised to learn that after so much work and time had obviously been spent on trying to make it happen, the Ladbrokes/Sportingbet tie-up fell at the final hurdle, apparently. Less surprising was the news that Sportingbet are selling all their Turkish business. The UK Government, in the form of both DCMS
and Treasury/HMRC, and other departments, are bombarding the industry with consultations – too many (I know of 16 which can affect our industry) in a short time period. At the same time, there’s a great opportunity to influence the current Minister, John Penrose, to remove a lot of the more bureaucratic, costly and unnecessary Gambling Commission procedures, in the form of the DCMS Select Committee reviewing the working of the 2005 Gambling Act. Select Committees are too often ignored as largely irrelevant, by industry. Like everything in politics they vary, according to the composition of MP’s and the subjects they are looking at. However, where, as in this case, the Select Committee has a Chairman from the Government Party, who is both authoritative and informed, and influential over senior colleagues including senior Ministers, the report can have real clout. John Whittingdale MP, the Select Committee Chairman, was the Shadow Secretary of State at the time of the 2005 Act going through its very lengthy and detailed Committee stage – the detailed clause-by-clause scrutiny. I worked with him. No-one now left in the House knows the detail of the Act better, and knows from before it became law the weaknesses, which we pointed out at the time but could rarely do anything about as we were in Opposition. For this Select Committee, the UK industry need to make a real effort to submit as much detailed evidence as possible; trade bodies can and should make powerful submissions both in oral evidence and in writing. This may be the only serious chance to get significant change for perhaps a decade. If the final Committee report is powerful, based on good evidence, this Minister (a deregulator by instinct and nature) may have the ammunition to enable him to make really significant changes. We won’t get a new Act but anything which can be changed by dictat to the GC to change procedures and practice, or by secondary legislation changes (small Statutory Instruments which can be “nodded through”) could be done if it gets to this Minister before he’s reshuffled/promoted and we have to start again persuading somebody new! I do hope the industry don’t drop this ball…
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