Dan Carden

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner, and to follow two such accomplished speeches. There is real intelligence on both sides of this House in terms of where we need to go now with gambling legislation. Most Members will know that I have worked over a number of years on the issue of alcohol and drug addiction treatment, and I share similar concerns about addiction in gambling. As you know, Mr Turner, I also have a passion for horseracing, and I will give a bit of context to bring the two together. We can all agree that the incessant advertising of gambling, in particular of online casinos and the most harmful forms of gambling, is destructive. I do not see why we should stand for that any longer. There is a second levy that is important in this debate. Fixed-odds betting goes back to about the 1960s. Horseracing—which I consider to be a great British sport that I wish to support, and is an industry that employs many people and livelihoods—is reliant on a levy from the bookmakers to the horseracing industry. That levy is applied only to bets that are placed on horseracing. There is therefore no risk to racing in dealing with the most harmful forms of gambling in this country. In fact, there can be a benefit to the horseracing industry if this House gets the legislation and the regulation right. We can reduce the most harmful forms of gambling and encourage forms such as taking a flutter on a bet or a Yankee on a Saturday—as we have done for many generations in this country. We can redraw the landscape of betting and gaming in the United Kingdom for the benefit of real-life sports and entertainment, away from the online casinos and the most addictive forms of gambling. Through the levy that my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) talked about, I hope that we can also make sure that more money goes into addiction treatment and support for those who are so tragically harmed and who, in some of the worst cases, lose their lives to this pernicious habit.