Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill

Lord Grantchester Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I have taken no part in proceedings on the Bill so far, but I will take the opportunity tonight to say a few words in support of what I consider to be an important and significant amendment. My noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint ran through the technicalities with great precision and the hour is late, so I will not repeat her arguments but will restrict myself to three separate points.

I asked myself why people consider a couple of years’ imprisonment a relatively light punishment and not a serious deterrent for a serious match fixer. For many people, it seems a victimless crime—except, perhaps, for the bookmakers, who as a group do not command much public sympathy. When I began my career in the City, there was another victimless crime—or rather, a crime that was believed to be victimless—which was insider dealing. In my generation it was perhaps not as widespread as in the previous generation, when you were not paid much money because it was expected that you would trade inside in order to make good your rather inadequate wages. Undoubtedly quite a lot of it went on.

When one asks why people accepted that situation, it was because the crime was believed to be victimless—and, if it was not victimless, it was extraordinarily difficult to prosecute and eradicate, because one could never catch up with insider dealers. Any law would be unenforceable, and an unenforceable law would have no merit. More importantly, if it was unenforceable it ran the risk of bringing the wider law into disrepute.

I have not had a chance to glance over the Minister’s shoulder to see the notes that he will use in a few minutes, but I suspect that there will be a good deal about the issue of unenforceability as a reason for not wishing to accept my noble friend’s amendment. However, to go back for a moment to the example of insider dealing, over a period of years, as the legal framework changed, the attitude to enforcement changed and the reputational risk increased, the prevalence and acceptability of insider dealing diminished. While I will not claim that it does not exist now in the City, its instance is pretty small.

That is what this amendment seeks to achieve: a higher penalty, linked to a higher reputational risk for engaging in this crime, so that its frequency is likely to be very much reduced. For match fixing is not a victimless crime. Its victims are not, of course, those on the inside, be they investors or gamblers; it is usually the smaller, poorer and less experienced people who suffer.

That takes me to my second point. If I could see further down my noble friend’s speaking note, I think I would see that he will emphasise not just the difficulties of domestic enforcement but the much greater challenge posed by the extraterritorial nature of so many of these crimes, which seem to have overseas origins. Leaving aside the desirability of our making the greatest possible effort to root out match fixing completely in the UK, my noble friend on the Front Bench should remember that Her Majesty’s Government have not always found extraterritoriality to be an insuperable bar. The Bribery Act, although not uncontroversial in its application, requires UK companies to take responsibility for their agents overseas, even where the agent is not directly employed by them. There are precedents and experience in this area which we could build on to develop our activities to inhibit, prevent and eradicate match fixing in the UK.

To conclude, it seems that this modest amendment sends a clear signal that the heat is being turned up as regards this crime: 10 years on conviction, not two years, could not be clearer. I shall of course listen very carefully to my noble friend’s reply in due course. The Hippocratic oath says, I think, “First, do no harm”. I want to hear from him not why the enforcement of this amendment will be difficult—I am sure it will be—but why its existence on the stature book would do any harm or not take us in the right direction towards eradicating this extremely unpleasant and, apparently, increasingly prevalent activity.

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

I speak in favour of Amendment 8, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Heyhoe Flint and Lady Grey-Thompson, the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and my noble friend Lord Stevenson. This amendment not only comes from all sides of the House but is in the names of great sporting personalities who have participated at the highest level of elite sport. I support them in their contention that sport must maintain the highest levels of integrity and be recognised to be fair and honest. Sport governing bodies have been relentless in stamping out cheating, whether through drugs, unfair equipment or fraudulent activity, in order to maintain the public’s interest and trust. We all enjoy the pursuit of excellence and recognise that competition is the spur to improvement. The public will turn away, sponsors withdraw funds and participants lose interest if they detect any level of cheating or corruption, or any lack of fair play.

The amendment creates a clear and specific offence of cheating that covers all activities that fixers may engage in. All sports would have this offence available under the Gambling Act. Recently, we have witnessed the difficulties cricketing authorities had to face in prosecuting and getting convictions regarding the bowling of no-balls by Pakistani cricketers. This situation could easily occur with throw-ins and other events in professional football. I understand that the authorities had to go to great lengths to enforce fair play and that they went ahead under the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906. This offence will enable a strong deterrent from stricter penalties to warn and educate all sportspersons. Professional bodies such as the Professional Footballers’ Association in soccer can underline to their members the dangers and risks associated with being caught cheating.

I urge the Government to take this amendment seriously and, if they cannot accept it tonight, to be amenable to bringing forward their own amendments at Third Reading, otherwise similar amendments will be pressed very vigorously then.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I am reminded by my noble friend Lord Grantchester that I have joined a rather elite and special grouping in turning up on this list. I certainly cannot pretend to have, in any sense, any quality that matches theirs in terms of the sporting achievements they have had. Along with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, I was a not-indifferent squash player, but I am afraid that does not take me far towards either the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, or the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson or Lady Heyhoe Flint.

I apologise for intruding on their party but I do so because this is a really interesting amendment, and I am rather annoyed we did not think of it ourselves on this side of the House. The 2005 Act was much castigated earlier on in our debates but is still a rather good Act in its way. It goes out of its way to make it clear that it is not dealing with the integrity of sport—this point has been made already—and does not attempt to try to deal with the actual issues around the playing of sport. Its actions are about gambling, and sport is only one of a number of things that people can gamble on. We should not therefore expect that Bill to carry us all the way to where we want to get to in this new area, which is about trying to make sure that the sport that we all love and enjoy is played to the highest standards.

I talked earlier about the need for integrity. It is an issue that we need to think very hard about. It is not necessarily the case that if you follow the argument that I am about to make through to the end we would end up with simply amending the current Bill; I suspect our ambitions are a bit broader than that. When the Minister responds, perhaps he could reflect on the question that has been posed implicitly in the speeches we have heard today and explicitly outside by a number of people who are now saying that there is something slightly odd about the way in which we pay so much attention to the process of gambling around the sporting activity but we do not think hard enough about what we need to do to ensure that the sporting activity itself is as clean and above suspicion as it should be. That is the way in which I want to approach this.

The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said that we were talking about something that is called a victimless crime and pointed out that that was a contradiction in terms. I follow him on that: his point is very well made. My noble friend Lord Grantchester, who has substantial experience in running a sports club of great distinction, knows all too well about some of the issues that have arisen there.

It is interesting that the only serious case we have seen in recent years, which involved spread betting rather than fixed-odds arrangements, was prosecuted under a conspiracy to defraud offence and not under the provisions of the Gambling Act. On my reading of it, that is not unreasonable because the Gambling Act does not go in that direction but, if that is the case, the point was made earlier about the need to level up the tariffs on all these approaches to try to clean up sport—they need to be the same. So we are talking about a 10-year penalty being the standard for crimes against sporting activity. If anybody affects the integrity of the sports that we are concerned about, we should be able to use a range of penalties and approaches to ensure that the person is nailed.

We have looked at the number of prosecutions for match fixing in sport and there seems to be about one a year at the moment. Although, as I have said, there are difficulties in raising these offences, it is important to recognise that they do take place. There is evidence that there is quite a lot of match-fixing activity going on, not necessarily all related to gambling, and that is one of my points.

The DCMS itself has a sports integrity review. It must have been ahead of the game in thinking that it would need to look at that, and the Rick Parry report calls for further action in this area. Therefore, the onus is on the DCMS to come forward with proposals on this. The European Parliament and Commission have called for all member states to have specific match-fixing legislation. Again, one might ask the Minister what action the department will take to respond to that call. The amendment before us derives from evidence of recent work in Australia, where legislation has recently been introduced. The amendment is based on a model that seems to be working well and is widely seen in the sport as an exemplar.

To return to my first point, although we must be thinking about the question of what to do to strengthen our sport, of which gambling is a part but not the full amount, it is interesting that the gambling industry supports this approach. Sue Rossiter, director of projects and policy at the Remote Gambling Association, which supports the amendment, says:

“Cheating is already an offence under the Gambling Act and match-fixing falls into that category. But anything which further clarifies the fact that it’s illegal is welcomed by us. Players should be made aware that if they get involved in match-fixing, they’re involved in a criminal activity wherever they are. We work closely with sports governing bodies to make sure players are clear about that”.

There is an educational element to this, which will be very important.

This amendment may seem to be at a distance from the main purpose of the Bill but it should not be rejected out of hand. I appeal to the Minister to think about bringing this back at Third Reading for a further debate, when it might be possible to get the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, to add their arguments to this. We will have to fix this in the future if we do not fix it now.

The sport that we play in Britain somehow makes a huge contribution to our culture. As my noble friend Lord Grantchester said, if people feel that the games they watch are in some sense fake then, to quote from “The Hunger Games”—a recent film that I am sure all noble Lords have seen—the games will not be quite as enjoyable as they might otherwise have been. That is rather an unfortunate and sad analogy but I hope some of it might live long in memory.