The betting industry has been left in a spin by the reduction from £100 to £2
PRESS a button and £100 disappears; 20 seconds later, repeat the process. An exceptionally unlucky gambler betting the maximum £100 ($135) stake on a fixed-odds betting terminal (FOBT) could conceivably lose £18,000 in an hour—although at an average payout of 97% of the user’s stake every spin, the more likely result in that time period would be a loss of around £100.
FOBTs have been controversial since they appeared in betting shops in Britain in 1999. Opponents of the machines warned that they would offer a quick fix for problem gamblers, of which there are an estimated 350,000 in the country. But betting parlours love them: the 34,000 machines currently in service in Britain earned over £50,000 each on average in the year to March 2017, bringing in a total windfall of £1.8bn. That sum is almost twice as much as the earnings of casinos, and also twice the revenue generated by the other 140,000 gambling machines found on the high street. Even with the restriction of four FOBTs per shop, a lightly manned bookie can still make around £200,000 a year from FOBTs alone.
In 2005, when the current gambling laws were brought in, the minister of state said that “high-stake slot machines, including FOBTs, remain on probation and we will continue to adopt a cautious approach. Government will not hesitate to act should there be sound evidence of harm”. Under pressure from anti-FOBT campaigners, the government announced a consultation in October 2017. On May 17th, it announced plans to slash the maximum stake for a single wager on a FOBT from £100 to £2.
Betting companies warn that the change will eliminate jobs in the industry. But the Campaign for Fairer Gambling (CFG), a lobby group, counters that maintaining the previous wagering limit would also cost jobs. According to a 2017 report, the gambling machines divert expenditure from more productive parts of the economy, and the CFG attributes the loss of over 23,400 potential jobs in 2016 alone to gambling on FOBTs.