Ms Catherine Colloms:

We supply it in response to customer demand. It is quite popular with customers but is one product across the suite of retail offers we have in UK shops. It is helpful in the sense that the racing customer who is particularly interested in racing can bet on races at different times of the day. It works well when one has a complete wash-out - one cannot predict what the weather will do - so it provides an extra product which is niche but popular. We have put it across shops in response to demand but it should be treated as any other product in terms of whether one would license that in a retail environment. It is a good product we supply across the UK.

The social aspect is a critical issue. All of us here would say we place the upmost importance on our responsibility to our customers. It is top of our agenda. We devote significant amounts of senior management time and investment to the issue. It is critical to ensure the structure of the scheme appropriately addresses the concerns and issues around social responsibility and how we tackle problem gamblers. There is much one can do, and some of this is set out in the scheme. We support the creation of a social fund. As Ms Gill said, there are some interesting models. The Remote Gambling Association, RGT, model in the UK is interesting in terms of how it examines research and helps the industry to determine best practice and how we can apply it. The idea of a self-exclusion register is interesting. We must examine how we could apply that in a retail context where it is much more difficult to apply.

Many things can be and are being done at an operator level. We devote a huge amount of time and energy to the issue and trying to ensure we can identify and assist anyone who presents with a potential problem. All our customer service agents in Ireland are trained by GamCare, the prime UK support service and information organisation for problem gambling. Those customer service agents are trained three times per year with repeat training to ensure they can try to identify people who have an issue, assist them and move them towards treatment or, in our case, self-exclusion.

One can take a variety of actions in the online world which allows one to track and monitor player behaviour. One can do much when people join and interact with the systems to let them be more in control of their gambling. We let people set deposit limits which cannot be changed. They have to go back into the system and ensure that time is set. That is critical and is something we would be willing to engage on in more detail regarding how we make it work.