Lord Foster of Bath (LD)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for her support for my remarks. I neither accuse her nor imply anything about who her support will be for the next leader of her party. I merely point out that almost everything she said is word for word what Mr Andy Burnham, now MP, said only two weeks ago. I am also grateful to others who have spoken. I refer to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, subsequently by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, and then picked up by the Minister, that we should be basing our decisions on principles: I entirely agree with that remark. But it seems to me there is one principle that we have accepted in this country for a very long time: that public health issues need to be dealt with at public level. The Government have accepted issues around unhealthy food, to put it like that, as a public health issue. They have also accepted, as the Minister has said from the Dispatch Box on a number of occasions, that gambling has to be treated as a public health issue. Therefore, I genuinely believe that we have got a principle that all noble Lords on all sides could get behind in relation to these amendments. I genuinely accept that the Minister is keen to keep the Bill as narrow as possible, but she pointed out in her remarks that the Bill is about protecting the rights of the event organisers—her very words. I therefore do not understand why we are placing measures in the Bill to protect rights in terms of ticketing, advertising and so on, yet she is not prepared to put a similar protection for the rights of event organisers in relation to their sports data. It seems that there is an absolute equivalence with all the other rights that we are protecting. Failing to do that in the way I am proposing means that there is a real opportunity for the growth of the black market, which she is keen to prevent. I ask her to look again in detail at this particular issue. It has been very carefully thought through. A lot of people have been engaged in work on this, and I hope that we come back to it at a later stage in our deliberations. On the black market, we need to be very careful to be alert to the fact that a lot of the growth in the black market is coming from people who have withdrawn themselves from gambling using a programme called GAMSTOP, and suddenly, because of all the advertising for a big event, they want to gamble again. They are not allowed to on the legal market, so they end up going to the black market, which is why we now have advertisements that say “not on GAMSTOP”. It is wrong to allow that to happen. I hope that the Minister will look at that. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.