Public Inquiries
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(3Â weeks, 2Â days ago)
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Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, on the earlier question about the importance of publishing a public audit of inquiry recommendations that will and will not be implemented and why, does the Minister agree that, without such a duty of candour, it could fuel mistrust in inquiries, which start to look like expensive ways of shutting down public debate and kicking concerns into the long grass, with no action, no accountability and no transparency?
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
We are determined that the duty of candour will address some of the concerns that people have had about public inquiries in the past. The length of some public inquiries causes additional trauma for some of the people involved in what are often huge injustices and sometimes major state failures. We are clear that we need to make sure that people get the truth. There have been some issues in the past: for example, some people lied to the Kerslake review into the Manchester Arena attack, but, obviously, the statutory inquiry that followed got answers. We need to make sure that people get the answers, and that is what we think the duty of candour will deliver.
Young People: Gambling Harm
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(2Â months, 2Â weeks ago)
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Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for tabling this debate on reducing gambling harm among young people. That sounds admirable but, hot on the heels of the Academy of Ideas World Cup sweepstake, organised by one of our young team, Jake Weston, an enthusiastic gambler himself, I want to appeal for perspective.
As a reminder, for the vast majority of people across all age groups, gambling is harmless. As Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has noted, it can bring joy to millions of people who enjoy a regular flutter. So many get their pleasure from honing their skills in working out—and hopefully beating—the odds. Others just enjoy the thrill and challenge of taking a risk, often the sorts of instincts we want to encourage, for example in would-be entrepreneurs. Yet too often in debates in this Chamber, we discuss this legal, legitimate leisure activity as though it inevitably leads to ruin. It is unfairly characterised as toxic and pathologised as addictive, a threatening destroyer of individuals and family life.
I thought of all this when watching a lovely clip of the football icon Kevin Keegan—in my opinion, the real king of the north—from a filmed interview doing the rounds since his sad death. Kevin movingly recalled how his dad used to back the horses regularly, just like most miners at the time. One year, he won a few quid on the Grand National and used all the money to buy his young, football-obsessed son some second-hand football boots, an act of fatherly love and generosity paid for by his hobby and not some sordid, dodgy, selfish activity. Will the Minister reassure us that the Government will avoid policies that purport to protect the young but, in reality, are a puritan Trojan horse for a prohibition that unfairly demonises gambling per se?
Do not get me wrong, I know from personal experience how out-of-control gambling can bring misery, but we need to be honest that this is a small minority. Acknowledging this will allow for bespoke policies that target real problems, rather than a blanket culture of disapproval or a catch-all of ineffective, excessive state intervention into people’s private choices.
We also need to interrogate some of the data and terminology that can misleadingly suggest that this is a growing problem. We are not helped by the fact that there is no single dataset that measures problem gambling among young people. There is not even clarity about our definition of young people. In gambling-related law, “young people” can refer to adults between the ages of 18 and 25, who can legally gamble with licensed operators but with age-targeted restrictions. Then there are under-18s, defined as children, who are prohibited from gambling in that way. This can be confusing—for example, having two categories of adult of 18 to 24 year-olds and 25 year-olds and over. Apart from anything else, are we in danger of infantilising young adults, who we otherwise expect to be responsible grown-ups? The prospect of 16 year-olds being considered adult enough to vote will not help this muddle. Unfortunately, too many commentators in gambling have developed the bad habit of using the phrase “young people” to cover both the under-18 and the under-25 categories.
Regardless, what does the data show? The NHS’s Health Survey of England, which confusingly uses the age range of 16 to 24, shows that problem gambling rates fell from 1% in 2018 to 0.5% in 2024. So why is this age group a focus of special concern? Are we really worried about gambling by children, given that it is stated as fact that 80,000 children suffer from gambling harms? But that number is extrapolated from 25 schoolchildren—yes, 25—who were classified as problem gamblers in the Young People and Gambling Survey 2023. To note, “harm” is classified at a hugely lower threshold than for post-18s, so what has been labelled harmful gambling—it has been described as “addiction” here—for those 25 children should make us pause before we panic. Two-thirds self-report playing amusement games such as crane grabs at seaside arcades—shock horror. Half are called problem gamblers because they place bets with friends and family, and 40% play cards with mates and siblings or occasionally buy lottery products such as scratch cards. What constitutes illegal gambling for children is even more banal. If kids bet using pocket money or school lunch money, it is against the law, even if it is spent on forms of gambling that are legal.
Counterintuitively, even the pantomime villain of online gambling has one of the lowest rates of participation in this age group. As an antidote to those who are oversimplistic on the stats, children gambling online are largely getting access from their adult parents, who are allowing their children to use their online gambling accounts. To conclude, let us tell the kids some home truths about the pitfalls of gambling, but let us not scaremonger them or ourselves in this House.
Enterprise Act 2002 (Mergers Involving Newspaper Enterprises and Foreign Powers) Regulations 2025
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(1Â year, 2Â months ago)
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Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)
My Lords, I will be brief. I am sure that noble Lords feel that they have heard enough from newspaper editors already. As another former newspaper editor, I was going to sit quietly, but I must take issue with the comment from the noble Baroness opposite that Rupert Murdoch was always an unseen influence on what senior editors wrote. As a former senior editor there who disagreed vehemently with Rupert Murdoch over very many things, I can say that that was not at all a consideration in what we wrote. I have no doubt that he told those at the Sun every evening what to write, and that they wrote it. It shows that newspapers are influenced by their proprietors if they wish to be, and if their audience is happy with that.
Listening to this debate, we seem to have lost the idea of what has happened to newspaper audiences. They are no longer what they were. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, talks about people having their newspapers delivered to their homes and those newspapers upholding British values. Maybe he has been reading the Daily Telegraph recently, but my reading of the Daily Telegraph is that it does not tally with my British values, and it may not tally with the British values of everybody here.
Newspapers have a role. It is no longer the role that it used to be. They are fulfilling it to the best of their ability, but competing with numerous other sources and not always succeeding. As others have mentioned, the web in various guises, particularly social media, provides the news for the majority of young people in this country. I contend that that is far more dangerous than any influence on a major national newspaper. If some major national newspapers were to influence the debate at all in this country, I do not think that Keir Starmer would be the Prime Minister today—it could still be Liz Truss. Newspapers do not have that much influence any more.
However, there is no doubt that the procedure that has brought us to this position has been flawed. I think the Minister accepts that the Government have not made the best job of this. If she can give the House some indication that the potential loophole between now and the autumn will be fully bridged, then we should support the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, because there is sufficient regret over how this has been done. We should not pass a fatal amendment that looks to a history that no longer exists.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, this is not a media studies debate on proprietors and their influence over the press. This is about state ownership, which is what we voted on. It is not about whether Rupert Murdoch has an undue influence. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, explained the process through which he concluded that he had changed his mind, but he has not changed anyone else’s—nobody even asked whether we had changed our minds.
This is about subverting the primary law, that we all voted on, behind our backs. A decision that we made has deliberately been reversed. Everybody might have changed their minds, but that is not the point. If you are thinking about the constitution, it must be brought back as a debate. If it was not for the amendments, we would not be having this debate.
The final thing is the context. Everyone who has spoken has stood up and said, “We believe in press freedom”. In this country, press freedom is ultimate: each party declares that it is for press freedom. I will remind noble Lords of the context. I am still in shock at the revelations about the super super-injunction brought out by leading members of both parties—or brought out by one party and then supported by the other—that has completely slapped press freedom across the face in relation to the Afghan leak. The reason I mention that is that when people say, “Can you just trust us? We all believe in press freedom—this is not going to undermine press freedom”, press freedom is already under pressure. We have seen that, behind the scenes, the press can be denied the right to information that they should have had in relation to that Afghan scandal.
As far as I am concerned, in this instance I will be supporting the fatal amendment put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, not necessarily for all the reasons that have been indicated by all the speakers from the Liberal Democrat Benches, but because we have to show that press freedom and parliamentary procedures cannot be subverted behind our backs.