Betting, Gaming and Lotteries

When I was a child in the 1960s, my parents used to take me to Blackpool, where trains arrived at the old central station every three or four minutes and when Blackpool could still attract the cream of stage, screen, TV and radio at the north pier shows and throughout the constituency. That was the golden age—if there was ever one—of the British seaside. However, like so many other seaside towns, Blackpool—perhaps more than others because we were always the biggest and, we argued, the best—suffered from slow decline and the gradual change in the structure of holidays. Dean Acheson once said of Britain after Suez that it had lost an empire and not yet found a role. Much of that truth is embodied in the predicament of British seaside towns today. The report that the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, which my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) chairs, recently produced on coastal and seaside towns provides eloquent testimony to that. It also eloquently outlines some of the resolutions that I and other hon. Members who represent seaside towns, including my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), who spoke so valiantly earlier, urged on the Government. That is why, for the past six or seven years, Blackpool has put all its feelings and every sinew behind the proposal for a resort casino. We did that not because we believed the insulting words of Professor Crow that it was a hand-out or a cure-all that would be dropped into our laps, but because we saw it as a catalyst. The mayor of Blackpool wrote only this week"““Blackpool’s proposals for its regional Casino would bring an estimated 2500-3400 jobs and £200-450m of capital investment associated conference/exhibition; leisure…and hotel uses in a small economy.””" With all due respect to my hon. Friends from Manchester, I have to repeat what the mayor went on to say:"““Manchester’s bid anticipates only 2,700 jobs…in a much larger economy with many alternative drivers for regeneration.””" That is the key. The regeneration and job-creation boost in Blackpool would be proportionately much greater than in Manchester. That was one of the factors about which the House of Lords Merits Committee specifically talked about. There we have it. That was our pitch. Of course, any panel was bound to disappoint someone. Of course, as Blackpool MPs, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood and I spoke up for our constituencies. How could we not have spoken up for the people of Blackpool who have given such tremendous support to the bid over the past six to seven years? There were 11,500 signatures on the petition. Those were from people not just in Blackpool, but across the north-west. My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) is entering the Chamber. May I say that 400 people from Manchester signed it? The reason was that they saw the Blackpool bid as a bid for the whole of the north-west. Obviously, we were going to be disappointed whatever happened. However, what has fuelled the anger, the sheer determination and the dogged persistence since 30 January in this House, in Blackpool and in the north-west has been the lack of coherence and accountability that went with the process and with Professor Crow's report. From the moment it was announced, there was criticism that the various elements of it did not add up. Crow failed to make himself available to a press conference. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood has already referred to his sneering remarks about managed decline. I sometimes wonder whether there may not be an afterlife for Professor Crow as a motivational speaker somewhere. I do not think that Churchill in 1940 or Mrs. Thatcher in the Falklands in 1982 would have thanked him for his observations. We hoped that we could turn to the Department for a review, but we could not. Why not? Because there had been no detailed scrutiny of the measure. The Secretary of State brought the measure and the panel's recommendations to the House six and a half hours after that report was received and said that she was minded to accept it. In a subsequent meeting, Members of both Houses, including members of the Joint Scrutiny Committee, who did such an excellent and eloquent job, asked her to review the situation before laying the order. She did not. It was left to the Merits Committee to drag a reluctant Professor Crow to the House of Lords, where the Committee echoed all the misgivings that had been put to it already. In a letter to their colleagues about the matter, Baroness Golding and Lord Lipsey said that it was a case of ““sentence first, verdict afterwards””. Indeed, the Merits Committee brought out strongly how that had happened. It said about Professor Crow and the regional casino that a number of respondents said that "““to minimise the opportunity for ‘casual’ problem gambling the regional casino should not be located in close proximity to residential properties.””" That was supported by Professor Collins’ memorandum, which stated:"““an increase in problem gambling is likely to be inhibited…if casinos are located where they are unlikely to encourage people to gamble on impulse.””" The Merits Committee pointed out the lack of experience of members of the panel in the effects of social impact and regeneration. It said that in essence the panel was selecting candidates for research projects, and then said:"““The House may wish to assess whether the…needs of the…process may have over-dominated the Panel’s recommendations to the exclusion of more common sense issues of where there would be least harm or where the regenerative power of a regional casino might matter most.””" Finally, it said:"““The Panel’s interpretation of their sift criteria did not give high priority to the prevention of harmful effects to the community from gambling.””" In effect, the Merits Committee shredded Professor Crow’s report, but with an elegant turn of phrase, as is the case in the House of Lords. It said at the end that it drew the order to special attention of the House on the ground that it gives rise to issues of public policy likely to be of interest to the House and"““may imperfectly achieve its policy objectives.””" When I read that I was reminded of the famous remarks of Emperor Hirohito when he had to go on radio at the end of the second world war to announce the defeat of Japan and said that the turn of events had not necessarily turned out to Japan’s advantage. That was the basis on which the House of Lords talked about Professor Crow’s report. We hoped that there would be scrutiny in the form of discussion between the Department and the panel during this period, but in all the written questions that I have put to the Department on the issue I have seen no evidence of that. Indeed, the written responses glorify in the fact that there was very little communication between the Department and Professor Crow’s panel, either before or after. Yesterday, in reply to a question asking how the panel reached its definition of social impact and what discussion there had been, I was told that there had been no discussion between the Department and the chairman of the CAP since the publication of the panel’s report on 30 January. Does that mean that the DCMS was entirely satisfied with the process that the House of Lords Committee had said was narrow and flawed, or does it mean that it was so entirely hands-off that it abdicated all responsibility for the process? Professor Crow’s report rejected all the advice of regional planners, all the implications, all the matters that my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood referred to from the regional assembly and the regional development agency. This was at a time when the regional spatial strategy had been a key part of the DCMS’s original strategy. It was one of the matters that dictated the timetable for this. This is not just a Blackpool matter; it is a north-west matter. We in the north-west have all worked together on this. It is not an anti-Manchester matter at all. I rejoiced when Manchester got the Commonwealth games and did such a fantastic job with them. My hon. Friend and I, as secretaries of a departmental Committee, wrote a strong letter to the chief executive of the BBC urging that it should move to Manchester and Salford, so let it not be said that this is an anti-Manchester thing. We did not see this as a parochial decision. But if, on the basis of this precedent, independent planners are allowed to drive a coach and horses through the planning recommendations in regions, what does that do for the process of regeneration and for regional strategies? All along, I believe that those of us who have been concerned about the order have tried to put forward alternatives. I have no desire to block large and small casinos and they would have to be reconsidered, as has already been said, in any order that came back. We suggested splitting the order. None of this has been properly taken on board. I have better reason than most in the House to know that the Secretary of State has worked hard over a long time to try to accommodate all the various elements of the twists and turns of the process. However, I say to her very gently this evening, as was said in the House about a Minister on another occasion in 1940, that she must not allow herself to be turned into an air raid shelter to shield the bad advice and incoherence of officials, advisers and unelected planners. That brings us to the heart of things. The reason why the debate has taken off is not just the fair play issues and affection for Blackpool, but that the matter goes to the heart of Government and parliamentary process, and is a key question for us as Members and Ministers. We have always had advisory panels—good and bad—and the Government do not have to accept their recommendations, as we saw only last week with the recommendations in the Lyons report on the bed tax. The debate has generated such concern because it taps into a vein of feeling across the House—that we are in danger of acting as technocrats and not as politicians or representatives. It gives me no pleasure this evening to point that out to the Secretary of State and to Ministers—nevertheless, it has to be said. I and many of my colleagues who have grave doubts about the process do not believe that the order or the recommendations of Professor Crow represent either our party policy or Government policy on the issue. A few days after the decision was made Steve Richards wrote about its implications in The Independent. He did not talk about the rights and wrongs of the Blackpool case, but about the process. He said:"““My concern is with the way decisions are made and who is held to account. Here was a classic example of an increasingly common phenomenon in which politicians are accountable despite having given their powers away to an anonymous panel.””" That is deeply and grossly unfair to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. It is her Department and her Ministers who have been receiving the anger of my constituents—not Professor Crow, who has gone back to the anonymity from which some of us thought he originally came. In those circumstances, it is right for me to say that I am genuinely grateful to my right hon. Friend for everything she has tried to do to accommodate the concerns of Blackpool and of people who are anxious about the process. I welcome the fact that there will be some form of scrutiny process, which was one of our central demands. However, as we have heard, that is something for tomorrow. I am talking about something for today—something that reflects on what has brought us to today. Ministers are not in this place simply to be messengers or rubber stamps, nor are we. I am grateful to the Secretary of State and to our Chief Whip for giving us time to debate the order properly, albeit not as lengthily as we wanted, but I am in no doubt about where my duty to my Blackpool constituents lies—it is to continue to stress my strong concern about the way in which the order was tabled. Parliament will decide. The Secretary of State has said that. Let us take her at her word and send back the order, and in doing so exert the power and reputation of the House to do the job for which we were sent here.