Et Tu, Andy Burnham?

A month is a long time in politics, and Andy Burnham hasn’t wasted his first one. Installed in Downing Street on 20 July after the party turned on Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister has already found time to open a front against an industry that spent the Starmer years feeling thoroughly clobbered and dared to hope the change at the top might bring a gentler tone. It has not. Betting shops, in the new government’s telling, sit alongside vape shops in the rogues’ gallery of what went wrong with Britain’s high streets, and councils are to be handed the power to keep them out.

The mechanics matter, so let’s be precise about them. Since 2005, the Gambling Act has instructed licensing authorities to “aim to permit” gambling premises, a presumption in favour that has frustrated councils for two decades, most famously when London boroughs tried and failed to hold back bookmaker clusters in the 2010s. Removing it flips the default. A council that doesn’t want another betting shop, bingo hall or arcade would, for the first time, have real freedom to say no. Add a planning permission requirement for new gaming centres, and local government finally gets the toolkit it has been requesting for years.

I can hold two thoughts at once about that. Handing councils more say over their own high streets is a perfectly defensible democratic reform, and some of the clustering that happened in deprived areas during the machine gaming boom has earned the backlash. What’s much harder to defend is the story being told to justify it, because the story is years out of date.

The industry’s fury this week has been about that gap between rhetoric and reality, and for once I think the fury is mostly justified. One bookmaker chief executive called the dodgy business framing an insult to staff and customers, pointing to tens of thousands of jobs, billions in taxes, and the funding that keeps British horseracing alive. His own chain’s expansion this year amounts to a net gain of a single shop. A free-market commentator put the analytical point more bluntly: the bookies didn’t displace a thriving high street; they moved into units the departing retailers left behind, and reviving a high street by killing off the businesses still willing to trade on it is, in his words, silly. Supermarkets and the internet emptied those units. Blocking a betting shop doesn’t summon back a bank.

The betrayal in the aim

Why does this one carry a sting the Starmer-era tax raids didn’t? Because of who’s swinging the knife. Andy Burnham isn’t some stranger to this industry. He ran the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the late 2000s, the very department that oversees gambling, in the years when the Gambling Act he’s now rewriting was bedding in. More than that, his entire political identity is built on the Britain the betting shop belongs to: the northern high street, the match on Saturday, the culture of the terraced towns he’s spent a decade championing as Manchester’s mayor. The licensed betting office sits as deep in that culture as the pub and the chippy. Hence the title of this piece. If the industry expected sympathy from anyone in Labour’s ranks, it was the football-mad former Culture Secretary from Leigh, and instead it got lumped in with the vape shops in his opening month. Every faction has its Ides of March.

The politics, of course, explain everything the sentiment doesn’t. Burnham took office promising to see off Reform UK, and the battleground for that fight is exactly the neglected high street, left-behind-town terrain where “we’ll clean up your town centre” polls beautifully. Betting shops are a safe villain: visible, clustered in the places that feel abandoned, and defended by nobody a focus group loves. Whether the policy revives a single high street is almost beside the point. It sends signals, and signalling is what new prime ministers do in their first hundred days.

So are the bookies actually at risk?

Here’s where I’d pour some cold water on the industry’s own catastrophising, because the answer to whether Burnham’s arrival dooms the high street bookie is not directly, no. Look at what the policy does. It makes new openings harder. It does nothing to existing licences, and existing shops are the entire question, because hardly anyone is opening new ones anyway. A power to refuse applications bites on a sector applying in trickles. The forces killing the betting shop are the ones that have closed three thousand of them since 2015: the migration of punters to phones, the 2019 machine stake cut that gutted shop economics, rents, rates, and this year’s tax squeeze pushing the big chains, William Hill’s owners among them, to mark further shops for closure. Burnham’s planning reform is a headwind added to a hurricane that was already blowing.

The real risk is subtler, and it’s the one the industry should actually worry about. Tone from the top sets the weather for everything downstream: the next Gambling Act review, licensing fees, machine rules, the appetite of the new gambling minister, Vicki Foxcroft, who inherits this brief in her first weeks with the Prime Minister’s language already chosen for her. When the head of government has publicly filed your sector under “dodgy”, every subsequent argument you make starts a goal down. That’s the wound this has inflicted, and it will outlast the planning technicalities.

That’s the player’s-eye view this debate keeps missing, and it’s the reason regular readers of this site should care about a planning row that sounds like someone else’s problem. Every trend I’ve covered this year from the tax rises, the thinning bonuses to the black-market drift the regulator is fighting with one hand while Westminster squeezes the licensed trade with the other, points the same way. The high-street bookie, whatever you think of it, is the channel where gambling is slowest, most visible and most human-supervised. A government that truly cared about gambling harm would think hard before making the safest channel the easiest one to strangle, and would notice that the shops’ customers are precisely the older, cash-preferring punters least served by the online alternative.

Do the bookies deserve the endless targeting, then? They deserve scrutiny, as every gambling business does, and councils deserve a real say over their own streets. What they don’t deserve is to be cast as the cause of a high-street decline they merely survived, by a Prime Minister who once ran the department that licensed them and built his brand on the towns they serve. And does Burnham’s arrival put the traditional bookie at risk? Not by this policy, which locks a door almost nobody was walking through. The shops’ fate was being decided by smartphones and spreadsheets long before July’s change at Number Ten. But the language of the last fortnight will echo through every gambling decision this government makes, and that’s the part the industry is right to fear. Caesar’s wound wasn’t fatal because of the knife. It was fatal because of who held it, and everyone in Rome saw it.