Fiona has called on the Government to fulfil its commitment to reduce the maximum stake on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) to £2, without delay. Fiona has spoken out on this issue for a number of years in Parliament, and called on the Government to reverse its decision, announced last week, to delay the implementation of the reduction in the maximum stake – which research shows will have a huge positive benefit to help those with gambling addictions. Fiona and a large cross-party group of MPs have put their names to two amendments to the Finance Bill, seeking to reverse this delay.
Speaking in Parliament on this issue back in 2014, Fiona said:
‘Some 400,000 people in this country are problem gamblers and 3.5 million are at risk of developing a gambling problem. These are not small numbers. Furthermore, 50% of problem gamblers reporting to the National Problem Gambling Clinic say that fixed odds betting terminals are a disproportionate cause of problem gambling. We can understand why that is when we hear that these high-stakes machines can take bets of £100 per game and that up to £1,800 can be lost in an hour. Every year in the UK, people lose more than £1 billion on FOBTs, of which some problem gamblers lose £300,000.’
Fiona has raised this issue a number of times since, including in 2016, when she asked the then-Minister Tracey Crouch (who resigned last week over the Government’s decision to delay) to
"look carefully at the merits of reducing the maximum bet per spin for FOBTs from £100 to £2, and at the important contribution that could make to significantly reducing problem gambling and the problems families suffer as a result?"
The Government subsequently agreed to this change in the law, only announcing the delay in the implementation of this change last week.