The Gambling Law Review

I just wanted to mention the publication yesterday of The Gambling Law Review, 2021 which I am proud to edit and is now in its sixth edition. Thank you to all the contributors. here is a link to the work on line: https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-gambling-law-review

Below I have set out some thoughts on the impact of Coronavirus which forms the Preface to this year's edition.

As always, these are my own tentative and personal thoughts on a very complex issue - so I would welcome comment and thoughts from anyone with their own views.

The Gambling Law Review: Editor's Preface

Again, the public showed that they would bear their share in these things; the very Court, which was then gay and luxurious, put on a face of just concern for the public danger. All the plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to increase among us, were forbid to act; the gaming-tables, public dancing-rooms, and music-houses, which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such-like doings, which had bewitched the poor common people, shut up their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenances even of the common people. Death was before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their graves, not of mirth and diversions.

Daniel Defoe. A Journal of the Plague Year

A year ago, I began the preface to the fifth edition by reminding readers of the most famous epidemic that ever troubled Britain: the Great Plague of 1665, which closed the theatres and silenced the 'jack puddings and merry Andrews' in London for a whole year. Writing of that same event years later, Daniel Defoe reminds us that despite the passing centuries, the human impact of plague has actually not changed that much. In another passage from his journal, he remarks how he could only pass along the king's highway if he obtained a paper from a magistrate to say that he was in full health. The judiciary may have been replaced by the PCR swab or the vaccine passport, but the feeling that the public does not enjoy its normal liberties is scarcely different then than now. Another point that Defoe notes, and which we should not ignore, is that the effect of plagues is marked not in inconvenient days or months, but in decades. 'Plague Bills' showing the number of deaths in each parish were first published 1665, and the practice was not formally discontinued until 1679. And so, I begin the preface to the sixth edition of The Gambling Law Review in similar terms and circumstances as those of last year.

There have been many changes in gambling law and practice over the last 12 months, but, with perhaps a few exceptions (such as Ukraine), they have been of a minor nature, reflecting perhaps that governments have been so overwhelmed by the social and economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic, that they have simply not had the time to revise the intricacies of betting and gaming regulation. So, in many cases, the legal frameworks that applied in 2020 will still apply in 2021. But the chapters that we each write are designed not only to focus on the details of regulatory change but also to canvas broader themes and directions for the future, and so our authors have all had to try to describe what the future will hold, as well as the past 12 months.

Following that theme, I want in this Preface to talk not so much about gambling, but about the state of the world in which gambling exists and the macro-changes that we now face. In that regard, it seems to me that the question so often asked: 'when things will get back to normal?' is not really appropriate anymore. The pandemic has had such a sweeping change on the lives of those in the developed world, that not only have we been forced to break our old habits, but have had enough time to discover and develop new ones. So, no doubt we will go back to restaurants and bars again, and sometimes enjoy high street shopping or a trip to the gym. But there will also, undoubtedly, be permanent changes.

In short, the pandemic, like a world war or a crisis of resources, has created a paradigm shift, a step change. We could go back to our old habits and ways of working. But would that really be such a good idea? Should we want to? The First World War, for all its tragic loss of life, brought us into the modern world and forced societal change at the deepest level. The peace in 1918 brought with it a number of social and legislative changes in the UK of key importance in the century that followed. The Education Act of 1918 enforced a compulsory school-leaving age of 14, recognised special educational needs for the first time and introduced school meals. The Representation of the People Act 1918 allowed (certain) women the right to vote for the first time, and the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 prohibited an employer from excluding someone from a job on the basis of gender. The Ministry of Health Act 1919 created for the first time a minister of Health and made the health of citizens a government responsibility. These pieces of legislation were not the immediate effect of war, but the indicators of underlying changes in the way that society had come to view health, education and the role of women in light of the changes that war had wrought on the collective mind. There was no way back to the innocence of 1914, but there was also much to be gained from recognising that the pre-war period contained injustices and social unfairness that could no longer be tolerated in the post-war world.

If we assume that the current pandemic will resonate in socio-economic terms as loud and long as a major war then, as we emerge from its grip, it is useful to identify and predict the things that may change, and the opportunities that exist to establish new habits that will make our lives better and fairer. Identifying such changes and opportunities is very difficult. My own views are shaped by my perspective – which is a middle-aged professional asked to shoulder the minor inconvenience of homeworking, not a young bar-worker furloughed for almost a year, or a nurse on the front line of treatment and still less a Chinese worker from Wuhan – but let's nonetheless try to uncover some of the themes.

i Geography – tectonic shifts in our domestic plan

Home/work

The most important collective discovery of the pandemic was our own homes. For millions, it ceased to be the place just to spend evenings and weekends and became the only focus of our lives. Many of us have toyed with the idea of working from home, (or rehearsed the uncomfortable conversation with our bosses about why we do not always need to be in the office). We always thought that we might be more efficient place to work, without a long commute, but there was never the empirical data to justify those theories. Now we have discovered what a year of work without a place of work feels like. The 'To Let' boards are springing up in urban centres, and thousands of professionals have experienced the freedoms and inconveniences of a different workplace: our bedrooms, studies, and kitchens. In 2019, 30 per cent of the UK's workforce had experienced working from home. By March 2021, the proportion had grown to 60 per cent.

The implications of this change are in my view very profound. While some are now advocating a return to office life in the summer of 2021, there is increasing evidence that the pandemic will lead to a permanent shift in the workforce away from urban centres and to more suburban and rural settings. Houses with space are more popular and generally cheaper that equivalent houses in towns. The need for large numbers of commuters to move each day to urban centres has been significantly reduced. In short, people will want to work from home more, and homes will feature as more important and valuable resources in our lives. Provided that the communications infrastructure can allow it, more of us will reduce our time in traditional places of work, and very substantially reduce the time travelling to our workplaces. This will have implications ranging from reduction in transport and carbon usage, to the development of smaller towns at the expense of larger cities. We will become a more disaggregated workforce. Over time, that disaggregation may not just challenge existing notions of work–life balance but also blur national boundaries. Once reliance on a physical workplace is diminished, and contributions to working life routinely come via remote communication, then one's workforce can not only be scattered across a country, but just as easily across a continent. We will need to see how employment and tax law deal with these challenges. But in some professional sectors at least, working from home is going to become part of the new normality. That poses challenges for government and infrastructure providers to ensure that our communications networks provide adequate bandwidth outside urban centres as well as within.

Home/school

The transition away from concentrated work spaces, to disaggregated working and living has some interesting impacts from a technological point of view. We have all become more adept at managing our own domestic IT systems, and fortunately by 2020 most companies' IT systems had developed the resilience to operate on a remote basis. So the transition to home working did not actually require very much in the way of new technology, just a greater acceptance of technology that was already there. To give one indicia, the number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams rose from 13 million in July 2019 to 115 million by October 2020.

Home also became school for many. Where once we worried about the number of hours our children were spending online, we were suddenly grateful that they were at least ready-trained digital natives. A whole young generation whose internet experience was limited to fun and games, began to use their PCs for lessons, exams, projects, Powerpoint presentations and multiparty video conferences with an ease that many of their parents could only envy. Perhaps we need to re-examine whether 'limiting screen time' is really an achievable or even desirable aim. And a young generation will have spent a formative year both working from home, and seeing their parents do the same. That generation has already had its 'home/workplace norms' set differently to the generation before. Thousands have seen the concept of leaving home to go to university completely altered – something that again may be a permanent shift, as we have all discovered that learning yoga, cookery or French are all perfectly possible at a distance. Examinations and ways of rating achievement more generally will also permanently change. The lesson for our educators, is that some types of experience that had previously considered only to be suitable for 'real world' teaching could in fact be engaged with adequately (or even optimally) through remote technology. Again, it is not that these things were not possible before the pandemic – but just that they are now a widely accepted alternative.

Home – the new entertainment hub

This conveniently brings us to highlight home as the new hub of entertainment. Of course, our living spaces and mobile devices had become the venues for streamed music, entertainment, sport (and increasingly gambling). But in 2020, home also became our shopping mall, restaurant and bar. In the UK, between November 2019 and November 2020 online food delivery increased by 107 per cent. Conversely, by comparison with the number of seated diners in February 2020, the UK figures for February 2021 were reduced by 99.88 per cent. Even when and if those restaurants return, it seems to me that they will be differently regarded. Expectations in terms of what constitutes value for money will have been reset.

Shopping is both a necessary activity and for many a form of entertainment. So far as its necessities are concerned, we have moved profoundly from a 'travel and browse' to a 'click and receive' model. The level of service provided by online retailers supported by a much enhanced and digitally managed supply chain has provoked a revolution in the way that we shop. It will be interesting to see the effect that this has on what might be called 'leisure shopping' – including for lifestyle goods and clothes. Again, a decline in land-based retail has been occurring over the last decade, but the pandemic has surely had a permanent impact. As restrictions are removed there will no doubt be a resurgence of interest in the high street – but probably not to the levels seen before. While there will still be strong demand for public places to enjoy retail experiences, certain types of shopping (for example normal grocery shopping) may well permanently move to an online model. The question then is how, without the support of traditional tenants like supermarkets, fashion, consumer goods and bookmakers will be able to maintain their presence on the high street and in shopping centres.

What does this mean for land-based gambling? As with shopping generally, we have seen certain types of gambling product transfer substantially from a land-based to an online model. To take one example, National Lottery ticket sales that were predominantly retail based, declined by 18 per cent with the onset of the pandemic, but online registrations subsequently rose by more than 1.3 million. This change is actually a win-win situation for lottery operators and customer alike. The operator now has a direct relationship with customers and does not have to use a retail network to sell tickets or pay commissions. It can know its customer better, check spending patterns, cross market and observe potentially damaging behaviour. For the customer, purchase of tickets is rendered simple, tickets are never lost and numbers are automatically checked. In short, a product that was always very suitable for a remote medium has been pushed by circumstances from retail to online, and it seems unlikely that it will ever go back again. Will the same be true of betting shops adult gaming centres and casinos? I think that it seems clear that casinos will still be seen as entertainment destinations. But the future for adult gaming centres and retail bookmakers seems less certain.

Travel away from home

One sector that has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic is that of international travel. The future of that industry is very interestingly poised. On the one hand, there is clearly a very large pent-up demand for tourist travel but, on the other, international travel brings with it a host of difficulties in terms of containment of the virus, and may also involve the public stepping outside its comfort zone. For every tourist eager to get back to normal holidays, there are others concerned by new variants. Restrictions on travel generally have had a significant impact on the world's carbon emissions (indeed we have seen the largest annual decrease in carbon emissions since 1900). So will we go back to a life of weekend breaks and convenience tourism? I think that the answer is probably 'yes, we will'. After all, at least for those in the northern parts of Europe and America, holiday travel involves one type of experience that cannot yet be delivered online – sunshine!

The picture for travel therefore seems a nuanced one: it will be harder to justify business travel, when we are not even commuting as much, but it seems likely that tourism will quickly revive to its pre-pandemic levels. Such travel will of course include the traditional gambling and sport hotspots, and hopefully attendance at sporting and tourist event will soon recover – something very much needed by many economies that have suffered profoundly in the past year.

ii The richer and poorer

The pandemic has caused a monumental economic shock. The FTSE, Dow Jones and Nikkei all saw huge losses in the early months of 2020, with the FTSE dropping 14.3 per cent during 2020, its worst performance since the credit crisis of 2008. The announcement of vaccines has caused many of the major indices to rise sharply, many to well above pre-pandemic levels, but stock prices are to some extent speculative reflections of future hopes, and do not adequately reflect the huge long term borrowing in which almost every government has had to engage. Those who print money, have placed their reputations on the line, and over the next decade are either going to have to grow or tax their way out of the crisis. Some extra burden will inevitably fall on the public.

At the household level, the pandemic has not treated everybody equally. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs, spent their savings and face an uncertain future. The burden has fallen particularly heavily on the young, who are most likely to be those working in the hospitality and leisure industries. By contrast others have done relatively well. In the UK, there are reports of as many as 9 million 'unexpected savers' who have faced a combination of either working from home or having their incomes supplemented by furlough schemes, and at the same time have been unable to spend anything on entertainments. Certainly, unlike other recessions, there is no 'systemic weakness' in the economy. Strangely, 2020 has seen not only record debts, but also record levels of personal savings.

Thus, while currency of all gambling – leisure spend – has been significantly reduced, in many cases it is a question of fun postponed rather than removed altogether. In the UK, the beginning of the pandemic came serious warnings from regulators asking operators to ensure that their customers, often bored, solitary and impoverished by loss of employment, did not succumb to excess gambling. So what happened? The latest statistics from the UK Gambling Commission (January to November 2020) showed no significant increase in gambling, despite the stories peddled by the media. There was, as might be expected, a continued growth in online gambling, and equivalent decline in the use of retail premises for bookmaking. But these trends are probably what one would have expected whether there was a pandemic or not. It is curious how constant gambling behaviour is in our society.

All of us have had our views changed over the past 12 months, and all of us have tried to maintain a sense of normality in unusual circumstances. It will be very interesting to see how our society changes as a result. But in the meantime, our group of author-lawyers have at least been able to keep busy working to serve our clients, and monitor developments in this fascinating and evolving area of law.

I wish to thank my contributors for their usual careful and detailed analysis of the gambling laws of their individual jurisdictions. The Gambling Law Review now contains 33 chapters, and I hope that next year's guide will cover still more. I also add a note of personal thanks to those in my own domestic and work bubble, my partner Vanessa and my son Louis, who have both had to put up with more of me in the last 12 months than anyone rightly should have to suffer, and to whom therefore I dedicate my own part in this year's edition.

Carl Rohsler

Memery Crystal

London

May 2021

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