Betting shops in the public eye: A commentary

• Published date: 01 February 2021
• Author: Peter Jones,Daphne Comfort,Tim Hall
• Date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2153

COMMENTARY

Betting shops in the public eye: A commentary

Peter Jones

1

| Daphne Comfort

1

| Tim Hall

2

1

School of Business, University of

Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK

2

Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Studies,

University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

Correspondence

Peter Jones, School of Business, University of

Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK.

Email: pjones@glos.ac.uk

Betting shops are a familiar feature in towns and cities throughout the UK. However,

in recent years, increasing social and political concerns have been expressed about

the presence of betting shops in high streets and about the role of betting shops in

encouraging gambling. Such concerns include the concentration of betting shops in

areas of social deprivation, the impact of such shops on the vitality of and viability of

town centres, the perceived links between betting shops and both anti-social behav-

iour and criminal activity and the presence of Fixed Odds Betting Terminals in betting

shops. This commentary paper outlines the origin and characteristics of betting

shops, explores some of the recent concerns betting shops have attracted and offers

some brief concluding reflections on the impact of policy responses to these

concerns.

1|INTRODUCTION

Newspaper article headlines such as “Britain's betting out of control”

(The Guardian January 21, 2020) and “We can't turn a blind eye to the

gambling epidemic any longer”(Sunday Mail February 2, 2020) suggest

that gambling is very much in the public eye. Such media headlines

certainly seem to reflect deeper social and political concerns, and bet-

ting shops, for many people the public face of gambling, have been

under particular scrutiny. Gambling is probably as old as society but

the first betting shops in the UK were opened in 1961 following the

passage of the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act. This commentary paper

outlines the origin and characteristics of betting shops, explores some

of the recent concerns betting shops have attracted and offers some

brief concluding reflections on the impact of policy responses to these

concerns.

2|ORIGINS AND CHANGING

CHARACTERISTICS OF BETTING SHOPS

Within the UK, formal betting at sporting events, principally on horse

racing and boxing, was increasingly common from the seventeenth

century (by the 1840s). Huggins (2000) suggested “there was already a

clear culture of urban betting”and argued that “betting had already

moved from a pre-industrial informal sporting model to an urban

industrialized, commercialized mass-market model.”Increases in the

speed of newspaper circulation and the development of the telegraph

system in the 1890s, which made horse racing results more widely

and immediately available, and improved economic conditions, which

increased the general population's spending power, all served to stim-

ulate the popularity of off-course betting.

Despite its growing popularity, such betting was illegal following

the introduction of a series of legislative measures from the 1850s,

which sought to curtail and control gambling because of the paternal-

istic view that gambling encouraged absence from work, an anti-work

ethic and criminal activity fuelled by gambling losses. However, by the

start of the twentieth century, sporting betting was an integral part of

working-class culture and it was highly organised. Up to the early

1960s, illegal sporting betting flourished via “street bookies”and

“bookies runners”who accepted bets, supposedly secretly, in back

streets, on street corners and in houses, pubs and factories.

All was to change with the passage of the 1960 Betting and Gam-

ing Act, which formally, if begrudgingly, recognised the existence of

this extensive gambling market and sanctioned the opening of betting

shops. The first betting shops were opened in 1961 and by the end of

the decade, bookmakers were trading from almost 16,000 outlets. Ini-

tially, existing local bookmakers, who took the opportunity presented

by the 1960 legislation to ply their trade legally, ran the vast majority

of these betting shops. At this time, both the location and the service

environment offered to customers was strongly influenced by the

Received: 3 April 2020 Accepted: 3 April 2020

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2153

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reprodu ction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Public Affairs published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

J Public Affairs. 2021;21:e2153. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of5

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2153