Examination of Witnesses

Part of Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 3:46 pm on 12 November 2013.

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Jenny Williams: You said that the present arrangements lacked teeth. I was surprised to hear that, because we have some of the most extensive powers of any of the regulators we deal with. I think there have been some misunderstandings: all the conditions that the gentleman from CARE was referring to are in our codes and technical standards—he might not be aware of our technical standards. Basically, the Gibraltar regulations are based on ours. There is a requirement on our licensees to offer pre-commitment levels to set the amount of time you spend. There is a requirement to offer  self-exclusion. There is a requirement to monitor players’ play and to decide whether to interact. There is all of that.

As the Minister said, we license only 15% by value, but for our licensees we can enforce all of that. However, there is a separate issue about what is required in addition to that. Although there was a lot of talk about data analytics and different ways of doing things—we are as keenly interested as anybody to find out what works—there is currently no consensus about which works properly and which can be counter-productive. For every bit of research that shows that an approach works, I could show you another saying that it has some downsides.

I am frustrated, as I suspect were the faith groups and the community groups, about the slow rate of progress on research, but it is now starting to gather momentum. The Responsibility in Gambling Trust has a big harm-prevention conference with some worldwide experts coming in to try to work out what we should be building into our codes to make them stronger. In that, we are streets ahead of the other regulators. That is because it is our population and we have the interest. We have the Responsible Gambling Strategy Board of independent experts advising us on what is to be done. As soon as it is clear that the codes ought to be more specific, we will make them more specific. However, at this stage it is not clear that that would not be counter-productive. So, as I say, on that level we have all the teeth we need for player protection if we can regulate all those supplying the British market—we currently only do 15%; that is where we are currently lacking the teeth—which is what the Bill provides.