By Dr Sam Kirwan and Dr Jo Large
One unmissable aspect of the post-Covid, cost-of-living crisis is the ongoing collapse of high-street retail. Yet, alongside the charity shops and vape sellers, one sector remains relatively intact; betting remains an integral part of the British high street, with a prevalence directly inverse to surrounding socio-economic indicators.
There has been no shortage of critique regarding the role played by high-street betting in contributing to conditions of poverty under austerity. When in 2014 Aditya Chakrabortty described the high-street betting sector as a form of ‘predatory capitalism’, he was highlighting the ways in which the liberalised gambling sector appears to reflect the very worst dynamics of neoliberal society. As Markham and Young and Banks and Waters have argued, the modern gambling industry, characterised by a concentration of power and expansion of influence, appears boundless in its will to extract maximum profit from its customers, with little regard for the ways in which its products amplify misery and inequality. Among the many critiques of the role of the Gambling Commission (the regulator created by the 2005 Gambling Act), the most damning is that it has enabled the proliferation of harm by emphasising ‘safer gambling’ frameworks without challenging these underlying logics of exploitation and extraction
Amidst these critiques of the high-street betting sector, there has been a lack of attention to the betting shop as a space of employment (Rebecca Cassidy’s fascinating ethnography of betting shops remains an outlier in this respect). This lack of interest is unusual given how the role of betting-shop employee has changed so drastically since the 2005 Gambling Act, and also given that much of the responsibility for reducing gambling harm in the premises-based sector falls upon the frontline employees who must implement the components of the ‘Social Responsibility Code’ (SRC) (part of the Licensing Conditions and Code of Practice). These include the need to intervene when there are indicators of ‘problem gambling’, to enforce self-exclusion schemes, and to carry out age-verification procedures.
Our research
Over the summer and autumn of 2023 we carried out semi-structured interviews with current and retired frontline employees in the sector. Whilst our focus was on the implementation of these ‘safer gambling’ approaches implemented in the SRC, these interviews covered a range of employment issues, often returning to issues of personal safety within an aggression-laden environment, and how betting practices and environments had changed in their time within the sector.
Most of our participants expressed a strong feeling that intervening in customers’ gambling habits, where there was a clear potential for harm, was something they felt staff should be doing. Many talked positively about when they had been able to encourage a customer to reflect upon their gambling and the harms it was creating. Despite the difficulties in implementing self-exclusion schemes they were seen to be a valuable tool that staff would always seek to enforce. Many of their reflections were in line with the underlying narratives of the SRC regarding the capacity for employees to prevent harm within the shop.
But participants also felt that the conditions for being able to carry out this harm-reduction work had significantly deteriorated in the era of Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), single-manning and multi-shop work (the mandating of staff running shops on their own and moving between shops without warning), and the profit-driven orientation of the modern gambling conglomerates. In these conditions, aspects of the SRC were experienced as factors that exacerbated the stresses and anxiety of work rather than reducing them. When participants were reflecting upon this most critically, these codes were seen as a way of shifting responsibility from operators onto frontline employees: making sure that it is staff that bear the risk and anxiety of reducing gambling harm.
An example of this raised in our interviews was the difficulty of acting on the back-office alerts created by FOBTs regarding excessive time or spend. Many noted the anxiety and fear of dismissal if they failed to act on these alerts and other potential indicators of ‘problem gambling’, despite the fact that coming out from behind the screen might itself be a disciplinary offence if it meant not being able to take bets. They could also put themselves in a potentially dangerous situation in the context of the customer aggression created by FOBTs.
There has been widespread criticism of the idea that a liberalised market, creating deliberately addictive and harmful products that enable the vast transfer of wealth from the most vulnerable in society to the most privileged, can be tamed or constrained by ‘safer gambling’ codes that rely on customers recognising their own ‘problem gambling’ and taking preventative action. We argue that what should be added to this critique are the ways in which this structure has shifted responsibility for gambling harm onto low-paid, precarious workers, who are balancing competing demands in the aggressive and stressful environment created by this industry approach. A desperate need for gambling reform has been eloquently articulated by Van Schalkwyk and Cassidy, among others. We argue that consideration of high-street gambling as a space of employment should be part of this reform. It should not remain possible for operators to continue to offer products that are intrinsically harmful, in spaces that are intrinsically unsafe, and be allowed to shift the responsibility and risk for any ensuing harms onto their lowest-paid employees.
In 2020, the UK government announced an overhaul of the Gambling Act to make the laws “