Clause 12
Finance (No. 2) Bill
9:15 am
Colin Breed (Shadow Minister, Treasury; South East Cornwall, Liberal Democrat)
To some extent, we do not have any qualms with the clause only in the sense that we worry about 2p machines and those that provide only a £5 prize. I wondered why amusement and gaming people bothered about them, but I found out why on a recent ferry crossing. Early in the morning, I discovered that vast numbers of schoolchildren were whacking their money or somebody else’s—perhaps it was their lunch money—into those low-value machines. They do not provide much of a prize, but I suspect that they enable people to commence on the road to higher stakes.
I do not have any qualms about how the Government wish to regulate or tax such machines. They are used, probably perfectly satisfactorily, in clubs and similar places. I have some difficulty accepting that they should be used in more public areas such as ferries, but I am happy to support the clause.