As The govt regarded as what to do approximately fixed-odds making a bet terminals last week, Malcolm George, chief executive of the Affiliation of British Bookmakers was once discussing whether or not they had been in point of fact a problem.
“These machines were introduced 15 years ago. Because that time the levels of problem playing within the UK have not risen,” he said.
The machines turned into popular after changes to the taxation on gambling in October 2001. There are actually greater than 34,000 of them. They generated a gross gambling yield (GGY) of £1.8bn between October 2015 and September 2016 (GGY is the degree of all money staked minus the amount paid out).
To put that into context, it is about 13% of the GGY of the uk gambling trade as a complete.
Every Other declare came from Labour deputy leader Tom Watson who mentioned figures display that gambling habit costs the economic system £1.2bn a yr.
The figure in fact comes from the IPPR assume tank and is the top end of an enormous vary. “people who are problem gamblers are related to among £260m and £1.2bn a 12 months of additional cost to executive,” the file says.
Such a big vary would already be atmosphere off alarm bells if the file did not warn: “due to boundaries within the available information, those findings can not be taken because the excess monetary value caused by downside gambling.”
there’s plenty of fascinating analysis of the prices created by means of downside playing together with things like crime and additional benefits, nevertheless it is not cheap to make use of this as an excess cost to the federal government and positively not just to make use of the top of the variety.
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