Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

I have some figures, but I wanted to put forward a counter to these amendments without going into the details. I have spoken on this on many occasions in this House and I have written about it. I have figures, and we can swap our statistics. But I wanted to argue that it is proposed that allowing advertising of any sort around football, and allowing gambling to be associated with it, normalises gambling—but that is a slightly odd argument because gambling is a normal activity. The vast majority of people who put a bet on do so without a problem: it is part of their private leisure pursuits, which they enjoy. It is completely within the realms of spending money that they probably should not spend—it is Christmas and I have done a lot of that over the last few days when shopping. One makes choices and spends money that one probably should not spend, but it does not have to be turned into some kind of problem. It is our choice, and there should be some perspective about the threat. The Gambling Commission does not give credence to the idea that gambling problems are completely out of control. Despite a lot of noise and rhetoric, there is no evidence that there has been an overwhelming increase in problem gambling since advertising was made legal by none other than Tony Blair’s Government in 2007.