I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because that segues me nicely into the next and final section of my speech, which is about new clause 1. I hope that the Government will accept it, but if not, it looks as if we will have a Division tonight. I believe that new clause 1 is quite mildly worded, and the Minister may say that he accepts its spirit. As for the possible restriction on the rest of the Bill coming into force—that this provision might be a block, which was raised by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin)—if the Minister says to my hon. Friend that he agrees with the spirit of the provision and wants the guidance, but fears that it will act as a block, that would be great. In that case, I suspect that we will not have a Division. The Minister will guide us on that.
The content of new clause 1 seeks to have the Secretary of State “issue guidance”, not to make detailed rules about whether a betting shop or payday loan shop should be open in a given high street. If the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) visited his salad days again, having been to school in the west midlands, and went back to Dudley borough, he would see the transformation there as in other black country boroughs in respect of clusters of payday loan shops and betting shops. Those clusters are not helpful to community cohesion, or to some of the most disadvantaged people in our society.
My hon. Friend and I have made it clear that, in asking the Government to issue guidance, we are not seeking to ban payday loan shops or betting shops, but to restrict the density of them. What seems to be happening—this is anecdotal; I have no statistical evidence to present—is that we are getting a clustering of such outlets in different areas, which is often, but not always, deleterious to those areas. We have an over-concentration of them. The same thing was happening, until the law was changed, with off-licences. Older Members might remember when getting a licence to sell alcohol was quite difficult because there was an unofficial density system operated by planning authorities. That went out the window, and every place—including petrol stations, for goodness’ sake—seemed to get licences to sell alcohol. We saw the same over-concentration with attendant social problems in some places, and we are rightly rowing back from that.
My hon. Friend wants guidance—I fully support him—so that we can row back from over-concentration of payday loan shops and betting shops. Part of this problem comes from a mistake made by the Labour Government, and some Back Benchers pointed out to them at the time that fixed-odds betting terminals were bad news and should not be encouraged. I have to say, to my chagrin, that my own Government did not listen, just as they only partially listened—some longer-standing Members and you, Mr Speaker, will remember this—when there were proposals for 16 super-casinos. There was a lot of to do on the Labour Back Benches at the time, and we got it down to two super-casinos. On fixed-odds betting terminals, we made a mistake.