Gambling (Geographical Distribution of Casino Premises Licences) Order 2007

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blaker. Many of the things he touched on are in the Report on Coastal Towns, which I recommend for Easter reading. I freely accept that some of the issues we talk about do not just apply to Blackpool; indeed, the bulk of what I want to say is not a plea for Blackpool but to address the issue before us—this order. As the noble Lord, Lord Blaker, said, Blackpool has a unique place in our social history. A combination of the electric tramway, the illuminations, the tower and the pleasure beach made Blackpool take a quantum leap in providing leisure for working people at the end of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries. But since the 1950s, Blackpool has been in decline. One consequence of the drop in visitor numbers, which is mirrored in the coastal towns report, is that the price of hotels and boarding houses goes down, as does the investment in them and the price they charge. The normal visitors stop coming and these places are populated by people on social security benefits. That distorts the figures for central Blackpool. The DSS residents of rundown boarding houses are quite a different problem from that found in east Manchester. The problem found by all seaside resorts is how to kick-start regeneration. Nine years ago, well before the Government got their hands on this, a man called Marc Etches, who was employed in Blackpool, came forward with the idea of a Las Vegas-style destination casino. Tessa Jowell said very proudly in the House that she does not want a Las Vegas in the UK. Well, I do, and for this reason. A couple of weeks ago Tim Henman was playing in the Last Vegas tennis tournament and it will not be long before Tiger Woods and his colleagues go there for a golf tournament. Las Vegas today is one of the biggest sports centres in the United States and the centre of its entertainment industry; it is the biggest centre for conferences and exhibitions and is becoming one of the growth centres for corporate headquarters. Gambling is a minority occupation in Las Vegas. Those of us who backed regeneration through a super-casino saw it in terms of a much broader-based regeneration. It annoys me that everybody thinks we are talking about a single building. We are talking about redeveloping something like two square miles of central Blackpool, with conference centres, restaurants and hotels. To the question, ““How can that happen?””, the answer is that it has happened in other places in the world. Casinos are a catalyst—that has been proved. I went to Niagara, which showed many of the same signs of declining from its high point in the 1950s when it was the favourite destination for honeymoons in the United States. A casino has given it a new life and new occupation. Money has also been spent on a 30-mile environmental park, broadening the context. The idea that we are talking about packing zombies into closed centres is just not true. We were talking about the expertise of the casino panel. The Blackpool master plan was backed by Sir Peter Hall, one of our great town planners. The idea has always been not to have a gambling centre but to regenerate Blackpool and get its back to its heyday as a world-class holiday destination. We are supposed to accept the findings of the Casino Advisory Panel as holy writ, but it is worth remembering that the Royal Commission on Gambling and the Joint Select Committee produced reports which Ministers picked at but did not accept as a whole. Only this advisory panel has suddenly taken on this new role. Yet, as it says on the tin, it is only an advisory panel. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies, emphasised not once but three times when he introduced the order on 30 January: "““My Lords, as I have indicated, the final decision will rest with the other place and this House””.—[Official Report, 30/1/07; col. 174.]" It has never been in any doubt that that has been the case. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Golding, and what she has tried to do, and to Gordon Marsden and Joan Humble, Labour MPs in the other place. They have worked hard and long to try to get some sense out of the Government; but they know the difference between a fatal Motion and what the noble Baroness has put down and that is why they accept it. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, never uses one word when 10 will do but he knows and I know that when the noble Baroness’s resolution goes through the Government can implement the licence for Manchester. If I am wrong, let him say it, preferably in a few words, and that the Government are going to wait for it—but he and I know that that is not the case. I know that Conservative and Cross-Bench Members will be nervous about whether we are breaking conventions. When we passed the recent measure on conventions, we retained the right to say no. One time when we have the right to say no is when a committee of our House, which is a whistle-blowing committee and is supposed to look at these issues for us, actually blows the whistle. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and his colleagues. It is not the most thrilling or exciting of committees, but boy did it do its job this time—and I pay tribute to it for that. We set up a committee like that and ask it go through the painstaking task of going through piece after piece of secondary legislation, then it suddenly brings forward a stunner such as the report that the committee has made. To say that the conventions of this House mean that we cannot do anything about it would make me think hard about the worth of the merits committee. It is there to do a job and, by gum, it has done it. As the committee pointed out, what it winkled out of the professor was that he changed the rules as he went along. As was clear by the time he had given his evidence, what the Crow review should have said was that Blackpool should not have applied—because it was working to a different context. I do not want to detain the House too long, but I shall take up the point about the activity of Councillor Bate, a Liberal councillor in Blackpool, who seems to have got very active in recent days. I ask noble Lords to look at the list of people supporting him and particularly at the name, ““Noble Organisation””, which is a company based in Gateshead. If you want to see a gambling shed, go to Coral Island on the Blackpool Golden Mile, owned by the Noble Organisation. Almost every television company that wants to show how tacky Blackpool has become starts off with Coral Island. I went there recently and saw it packed to the gunnels with gaming machines, sucking in the vulnerable and sucking out money from the town and making no contribution at all. I contrast that with what a super-casino would have brought in—massive new investment and the kind of training that is already taking place at Fylde FE College for young people to work in the new industries.