Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what research his Department has commissioned on the potential harm caused by fixed odds betting terminals in Scotland.

The Government has not commissioned research specific to Scotland.

The Responsible Gambling Trust published the largest piece of research into gambling related harm on FOBTs in Great Britain last December. The Gambling Commission, as the statutory advisor to the Government published its advice on the conclusions of the research as well as next steps in March this year. This amounted to industry monitoring and evaluating its player protection efforts; to conduct further research into problem gambling and to persuade customers to move to an account based system so that more intelligent interventions can be made using statistical analysis of customer spend.

The previous Government introduced regulations that ended unsupervised stakes over £50 on B2 gaming machines. We want to wait for the evaluation of these regulations before we consider further legislative changes.