Mr. David Hickson:

I will begin by addressing the Deputy's third question on the social aspects of problem gambling. I have studied several of the studies produced in the United Kingdom and Canada and they seem to be somewhat standard in that between 73% and 84% of the population of the respective countries have gambled once in the past 12 months. Approximately 1% of the populations, on average, have problems with gambling. Between these two poles lie the low risk category which comprises 5.7% of the population and the moderate risk category, at 2.7%. The legislation aims to deal with the latter two categories. Most people can police themselves and know what they can afford to gamble, whereas a small cohort of problem gamblers need professional help. The legislation will be particularly helpful to those who are in the low to moderate risk categories. If the legislation does nothing other than require everyone who gambles to be over the age of 18 years, it will go 50% of the way towards what we are trying to achieve.

The Deputy also asked about availability online.

This is a fact of life and there is little we can do with it. In Italy they try to engage in ISP blocking for unlicensed operators. It is a partial solution and is not completely effective. To try to prevent problem gambling we will have to examine measures we can put in place such as self-exclusion, ensuring people are over 18 and having responsible operators who value their licence and reputation and who will monitor their players' behaviour in a meaningful way. The online sector can do that just as well as the land-based sector, and possibly more accurately.

With player tracking they can monitor the level of play in which players are engaging, establish what is normal for them over an initial period and monitor how they behave against that normality in the future. Then it is down to having staff who are able to be aware if some people might be going beyond their means. They might overhear a comment or see somebody getting frustrated, and they are able to intervene, bring it to a manager's attention, and the manager may offer the customer the option of self-exclusion. In a severe case they can impose a suspension for the person's benefit. I know this from personal experience.

The problem is some operators will do this on a voluntary basis but not all operators are doing it. An addict who is genuinely sick will not learn from one suspension but needs to be suspended across the board. We do not have that facility in place but this legislation can work towards establishing a linked-in self-exclusion register that we operators are obliged to send to a central database.