You probably know them as amusement arcades but the Gambling Commission knows them as Adult Gaming Centres. The pressure group Gambling With Lives claims that they offer “the most addictive gambling products out there”. The Association of Directors of Public Health has complained about their “proliferation”. The Local Government Association wants more powers to “curb their “spread”. GB News found a “gambling survivor” who dubbed them the “crack cocaine of gambling”. And, inevitably, the Guardian has been writing a series of pearl-clutching articles about them, bemoaning the fact that they are “disproportionately concentrated in Britain’s most-deprived areas” (i.e. seaside towns and city centres).
If this all sounds familiar it is because it is a carbon copy of the campaign against betting shops and fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) a decade ago. The anti-gambling lobby are mostly focused on suppressing online gambling these days, but they have found time to relive past glories and go after slot machines again. FOBTs were de facto banned in 2019 when the stake limit was lowered to an unplayable £2. The number of FOBTs in Britain fell from a peak of 34,949 in 2015 to zero in 2021. As anyone could have predicted, players switched to low-stake machines in betting shops and amusement arcades or went online.
This should have been a great victory for “public health”. FOBTs were said to be uniquely addictive and their high stakes were said to be uniquely dangerous. The gambling minister at the time, Tracey Crouch, claimed that there were 240 suicides related to the use of FOBTs every year. There was not a shred of evidence for this statistic, but that was typical of the campaign in general which was based on assertion, anecdote and the myth that there had been an unacceptable “proliferation” of betting shops.
As the graph from the Gambling Commission below shows, this was always nonsense. After a trivial increase between 2010 and 2012, the number of bookies went into decline, at first gradually and then, after the £2 stake limit, suddenly. The collapse of the bookmaking industry is the main reason why the number of places you can go to gamble has fallen by 30 per cent in the last decade. But there was never any proliferation of betting shops. They just started to be noticed more by the middle class, partly because falling rents on the high streets allowed bookies to move out of the side streets and partly because the media started banging on about them and the “crack cocaine of gambling” that FOBTs supposedly represented. There may have been a clustering of bookmakers in certain areas, but that was the result of the government limiting each shop to four FOBTs each.
With the dreaded fixed-odds betting terminals banished from the high street, Adult Gaming Centres cashed in. Since 2019, their revenues have risen from £447 million to £664 million, an increase of £217 million. This is much less than the £772 million lost by the bookmakers and it is chicken feed compared to the extra £1.2 billion made by online casinos, but it means that Adult Gaming Centres are the only part of the UK’s land-based gambling industry that is doing better than it did before the pandemic. For the anti-gambling lobby, this puts a target on its back.
And yet, as you can also see in the graph above, the number of arcades has not increased either. When the Guardian says that “the number of slot machine shops has risen by 7% since 2022”, they are not telling the whole truth. There were closures during the pandemic which have been partly reversed but there were still fewer of them in 2024 than in 2019. If people are noticing them more, it is for the same reason people started noticing bookmakers a decade ago.
The industry’s trade body Bacta (the British Amusement Catering Trade Association) says that the growth of its sector reflects “market realignment after B2 [fixed odds betting terminal] machine stake changes”. This is a polite way of saying that they nobbled the competition. After lobbying against FOBTs, it would take a heart of stone to not have at least a wry smile at the backlash that Bacta is now facing. During the anti-FOBT campaign they formed a Bootlegger and Baptist coalition with anti-gambling activists. Both Bacta and Novomatic UK — the holding company for Admiral Slots — were associate members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group that successfully campaigned against the machines. Their reasons for doing so were plain enough. They were not allowed to have high-stake machines but the bookies were, and they were losing money as a result. To beat the bookies, they decided to break bread with their natural enemies who have now, not unpredictably, turned on them.
Let’s face it, the anti-gambling lobby does want to ban all gambling
Thanks to the anti-FOBT campaign, groups such as Gambling With Lives and Clean Up Gambling have a proven blueprint for success: find a few people with sob stories, complain about “proliferation”, make unevidenced claims about the machines being especially “addictive”, and get a few MPs on board. This is all well underway, even though the arguments made against FOBTs don’t really stack up when made against the jackpot and fruit machines found in Adult Gaming Centres. When FOBTs appeared in the early 2000s, they were so different to fruit machines that the government didn’t know quite what to do with them. By contrast, machines in Adult Gaming Centres, though more technologically advanced, are essentially the same as they have been for decades. You cannot bet anything like £100 every twenty seconds on them. Insofar as they offer “casino games”, they are at very low stakes. Anti-gambling campaigners themselves once insisted that FOBTs were a special case.
If you think low-stake gambling in a supervised, alcohol-free environment should be banned, you probably want to ban all gambling. And, let’s face it, the anti-gambling lobby does want to ban all gambling. Bacta is learning the hard way that if you give these people an inch they will take a mile.
