Racing: Punters betrayed by Labour's empty promises

The National Association for the Protection of Punters (NAPP) is no more, and Britain's punters are left without a voice.

Greg Wood on the empty promises which betrayed the cause of protection for betting's consumers.

A great many powerful people were in a very good mood last Friday evening. After six years of scratching frantically at the itch that was NAPP, it had suddenly gone away all by itself. Normal service had been restored at last, and the punters of Britain could again be squeezed dry without anyone raising so much as a whimper. In dozens of boardrooms, it was trebles all round.

There are those who claim that punters are simply not a very clubbable bunch of people. It's nonsense, of course. OFGAS, OFWAT and - somewhat ironically - OFLOT look after the collective interests of consumers of gas, water and the Lottery. But until the National Association for the Protection of Punters came along, it was easy for the administrators whose fat salaries are paid - via the Levy - out of backers' pockets to treat their benefactors like a cashpoint machine which didn't bother to keep count.

NAPP itself was composed of people who had little in common. But they had all taken a long look at the amount of money which punters put into the racing system (not to mention the Exchequer), and then another at the contempt with which they are treated, and decided - this is wrong.

For years they existed on nothing but subscriptions (it was just pounds 10 a year), and even then would cheerfully take up cases on behalf of people who had not joined NAPP beforehand, and did not do so afterwards. At the same time, those arranged on the other side of the battlefield could call on almost unlimited resources. Worst of all, most of it was, originally, betting money. They were, in effect, under friendly fire.

The biggest villain in this respect was not BOLA, which, after all is paid to push the interests of the biggest off-course bookies, but the Levy Board. The Board exists for no other reason than to distribute money - a little over pounds 50 million annually - collected from punters via the tax on off-course bets.

They spend pounds 2 million just on administrating themselves. They dish out pounds 300,000 a year to compensate racecourses which have been forced to abandon meetings (normal businesses, you might imagine, would take out insurance against the weather), and an astonishing pounds 163,000 to point-to-point racing, which do not generate a single penny of Levy. And yet, when NAPP asked for pounds 250,000 to employ up to five full-time staff, fighting for and defending the sort of rights which other consumers would take for granted, the Board treated them with contempt.

So long as the money keeps rolling in, they do not seem to care that no worthwhile system exists for resolving betting disputes, that magistrates hand out betting licences like confetti, or that dodgy bookies (Front Line and Bowmans in the last couple of years alone) can go bust owing hundreds of thousands of pounds to punters who, unlike tourists stranded by a collapsed holiday form, have no hope of compensation.

Seven months ago, the Board's attitude was all too predictable. NAPP were troublemakers, revolting peasants who made life uncomfortable for their lords and masters as they practised the noble art of sticking their noses in the trough.

Hang on in there, though, the campaigners were told by various Labour Party contacts. After the election, things will be different. It was, like so many others, an empty promise. Last Thursday, George Howarth, the Home Office minister, made it perfectly clear to a NAPP delegation that, if their work was to continue, it would do so unfunded.

"He didn't want to know," Michael Singer, NAPP's chairman, says. "We made it clear that once we walked out, we would be curtailing the operation, but he just didn't care." So, when next you venture into the unregulated world that is British betting, remember that you do so without consumer protection.

Pray that your bookie does not go under, or discover an obscure rule which turns your bet from a winner into a loser, for you will complain alone, and no-one will listen.

Singer believes it "a national scandal that the Government collects pounds 1.4 billion a year from gambling but not a penny of it goes back to protect the people providing it." Anyone who agrees should direct their comments to George Howarth at the House of Commons.