Evening Standard (London): The opposition to gambling

THE EXTENT of public disquiet with the Government's Gambling Bill is revealed today in a poll showing that well over half of those asked were opposed to the envisaged liberalisation of the law. Just over a third actually approve. Revealingly, opposition to the Bill is far more marked among women - hardly surprising, as in many of them fear that the family income may well be squandered in the new supercasinos. The point, well made by the poll, is not that people are opposed to gambling per se - most Britons gamble one way or another. It is that they see the Gambling Bill as the introduction of gambling on a far larger and more pervasive scale than before.

And there are now signs - despite the Prime Minister's dismissal of public fears as "farfetched" - that the Government may be responding to those concerns. As we report today, the Bill may be amended to impose a de facto limit on the number of new super casinos by imposing a minimum of 4,000 square feet devoted to non-gambling activities in any new complex.

The scale of investment this implies would mean that the number of casinos would in practice be limited to between 20 and 40 rather than the hundred that critics feared. This is less satisfactory as a curb than the second likely amendment, which will extend councils' scope to reject the mega-casinos on moral grounds. Some may well do so, although the Government has effectively enabled gaming tycoons to bribe local authorities with millions of pounds to win planning permission for their operations, using Section 106 of the planning laws. This paper is not against liberalisation of the Gambling laws in principle. But the Government itself appointed an allparty committee drawn from both Houses of Parliament, chaired by John Greenway, which scrutinised the draft Bill. It has pointedly ignored many of the committee's sensible recommendations relating to controls on the new supercasinos.

Those proposals should be reconsidered if this Bill is not to be seen as an unholy capitulation to a coalition of gambling industry lobbyists and Labour backbenchers seeking favours for their own - in some cases, marginal - constituencies.