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BETTING & GAMING COUNCIL
ALL YOU NEED IS BALANCE Brigid Simmonds, Chair of the Betting & Gaming Council, catches up with Tim Poole to discuss how alcohol and gambling compare, advertising, social media abuse and driving industry change To go back a little bit in terms of your career, you worked quite a lot in the alcohol industry, can you tell us some more about your background? For 10 years I was Chief Executive of the British Beer and Pub Association, but before that, for 17 years, I ran something called Business in Sport and Leisure, which again was talking with politicians. It was wider, there was a bit on the gambling side, and on the alcohol side, but it was also about watching sport, which is my passion. It did planning and it did employment, which I think are important too. How does working in alcohol and gambling compare? It’s quite an interesting starting point. When I started with the beer and pub sector, they’d
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slightly lost their way with government and seen endless increases in tax. We had Gordon Brown, who was Scottish, so whiskey got a good deal, but nobody else got one. I think we reintroduced them to believing that pubs are quintessentially English, you’re better off drinking at a pub because someone is looking after you than doing it on the riverbank, and that the average politician has 53 pubs in their constituency. There are enormous amounts of pubs and brewing is [a big industry]. Even if you’re Heineken, you brew in the UK. So I think we moved that dialogue on. We need to do the same for gambling. I believe that alcohol and gambling are both things that people choose to do in their leisure time. As long as you drink responsibly, you gamble responsibly and moderately, there is nothing wrong with that. I have a slightly different view about tobacco. I have never worked in that because it’s just bad for you, but the alcohol and gambling industry are actually quite similar. We need to work hard to make
