Tag: Social Market Foundation

Who briefs the minister?

Geoff Banks

Next Monday at Labour conference in Liverpool there is a fringe event titled What Next for Gambling Reform: Time for a New Act?

It runs at the Live Lounge in the M&S Bank Arena which presumably the person funding the whole bash has acquired at considerable cost.

The new Gambling Minister, Vicky Foxcroft, is on the panel. It will be her first substantial public outing on the brief, a few weeks into the job.

Look at the nodding dogs invited. The chair is Dr James Noyes, Senior Fellow at the Social Market Foundation. The SMF’s gambling research programme is funded by Derek Webb. One of the two hosts is the Coalition to End Gambling Ads, whose director Will Prochaska also sits on the panel. Funded by Derek Webb. The other host is More in Common, the polling company whose surveys the Coalition cites when it claims the public supports an advertising ban. Alex Ballinger MP and Dawn Butler MP complete the lineup. A more dedicated group of prohibitionists it would be hard to find. It is dignified by this latest sham version of gambling ministers to make the pilgrimage

Noyes asked publicly for any questions to what are described as ‘experts.’ a loose term one suspects for people who wouldn’t know a betting shop from a cinema. All those questions asking about the warped nature of the panel, ignored. One chump asked why his bets get trestricted by bookies? Will be put to the panel.. You get the drift

So who exactly is Derek Webb? Not a British public health expert. He is a casino entrepreneur who invented Three Card Poker, a high margin table game built for fast, repeated play. It remains one of the most profitable products on any casino floor. Webb sold out for a fortune and now pumps that casino money into Britain through a Beverly Hills company, funding think tanks, campaign groups and political parties to restrict how British punters spend their own money. He doesn’t believe you’re capable of managing how you spend your money. You’re all dribbling fools needing his help. Or he thinks it’s the fast track to a peerage. My money is on B

Prohibitionist central

Webb gave over one million pounds to Labour before the last election. A man enriched by one of the fastest, highest margin gambling games ever devised is paying to lecture this country about the dangers of a bet on the 3.30 at Haydock. There is a word for that.

Now count the other side of Monday’s panel. No licensed operator. Nobody from racing, a sport that stands to lose hundreds of millions from the policies this panel will promote. Nobody who speaks for the millions of smelly unwashed people who bet legally every week without harm. Excluded. This is not a breach of any code. Ministers speak at fringe events all the time and there is no rule requiring balance on a conference panel. Ms Foxcroft is entitled to attend and let her derive discomfort from the atmosphere. One hopes her virtue signalling ends with the next election. Quite what she’s doing administering gambling is unclear

Let’s not pretend it is a debate. Every organisation on that platform sits inside a single parochial funding network, glorifying in their own effluence, nodding enthusiastically along as you do when you’ve found new money, and a new minister will receive her introduction to gambling policy entirely from one side of the argument. The record of that side deserves scrutiny. In 2020 Dr Noyes wrote the SMF paper proposing affordability checks at one hundred pounds a month. A pitiful £3 a day. Lose more than that and Noyes expected  your bookmaker to demand payslips. He later retreated from the absurdity, but only after several years of damage

That thinking fed the checks which have driven high staking customers out of the regulated market, damaged racing’s finances and reduced problem gambling by not one measurable person. The Coalition’s statistics on gambling revenue have been publicly corrected by the outgoing chief executive of the Gambling Commission. These are the voices that will have the Minister’s undivided attention on Monday.

So here is the question I would put from the floor. Minister, who briefs you on the other side? What meetings are in your diary with the licensed industry, racecourses and the customers your policies will affect? And as a representative of a government claiming to desire growth – aren’t you in the wrong place? Or just simply in the wrong job

If the answer is none, your induction is not an education. It is a recruitment. My invitation stands. I run a licensed independent bookmaker. I will meet the Minister any day she chooses, and I will bring punters, not lobbyists. She should hear both sides before the first decision is taken, not after. 

The harm figures don’t hold, and neither does the man citing them Will Prochaska has written in PoliticsHome (funded rag) that Britain’s gambling market has left “millions of people harmed, communities held back, high streets blighted”. Every part of that sentence is contestable, and the numbers underneath it do not survive scrutiny. Even in the world of Mary a Whitehouse types there ought to be a grain of evidenceThe absurd claim that millions are harmedThe figure derives entirely from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain. Regulus Partners has shown the GSGB overstates participation in some gambling activities by as much as 728 per cent. Its problem gambling estimate of 2.7 per cent is around seven times the 0.4 per cent NHS figure that the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities itself used. Where is the documented rise in actual problem gambling rates to support his fantasies? To accept it, you must also accept that every official gambling statistic produced over seventeen years was substantially wrong, that the NHS has serially misreported the prevalence of health disorders generally, and that audited operator customer data is incorrect.The Commission’s own independent reviewer, Professor Sturgis, found the survey may substantially overstate both gambling and gambling harm errrr. The Commission’s counter-evidence on response bias was debunked by Sturgis and then suppressed, (commission has group 1 form for surpression of inconvenient information) emerging only under Freedom of Information. Its lead advisor, Professor Wardle, had already warned that the dominant effect was over-reporting within the GSGB rather than under-reporting elsewhere. The Commission has conceded the survey’s principal value may lie in trend analysis rather than measuring prevalence.Applied consistently to the same dataset, the methodology makes roughly one million National Lottery customers problem gamblers, at a cost exceeding £6.2 billion.That is the arithmetic on which the harm campaign rests.The claim that high streets are blightedBetting shop numbers have fallen from around 8,995 in 2015 to 5,825 in 2025. The Gambling Commission has confirmed roughly 3,000 closures since 2019 and more than 15,000 jobs lost. Adult Gaming Centres are fewer than they were in 2012 and have not changed materially in a decade.There is no proliferation. There is a contraction, and the regulator has said so publicly.Who is making this argument? Will Prochaska is Director of the Coalition to End Gambling Ads and previously led Gambling with Lives. CEGA states on its own website that it is funded by Las Vegas residing Derek Webb. You know him eh? The same declaration appears in his competing interests statement in the BMJ.Derek Webb made his money inventing casino table games, including three card poker. His campaigning began when he found his game running on fixed odds betting terminals without royalties. He has said publicly that instead of suing he funded a campaign to make his point. He then spent around £3 million making those machines commercially unviable through regulation. He has since given substantial sums to the Labour Party, including £750,000 in 2024 and £300,000 in 2023.So the man calling for the end of gambling advertising is funded by a man who profited from casino gaming and turned to UK regulation after a commercial dispute.That matters for the  Prochaska blurb. He cites the Social Market Foundation as ‘independent corroboration’ of his economic case. The SMF is also funded by Derek Webb! He is not citing external support. He’s one of Webb’s boys. In the clubHis own organisation’s website relies on the OHID estimate of gambling-related deaths in England. That is the same OHID analysis the Office for Statistics Regulation has said cannot be used to support causal claims, and which OHID’s own Director-General has stepped back from. Because it’s almost entirely a work of fiction. None of this is hidden. CEGA declares its funding openly. The problem is not secrecy. It is that a campaign funded by one man keeps citing itself as evidence, and Parliament keeps treating it as an excuse to be worthy.