Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-02-11-Speech-4-027"
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"en.20100211.4.4-027"2
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"Mr President, first of all it is a privilege on behalf of the Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection to welcome our new Commissioner Michel Barnier for the first time to what I am sure will be many interchanges across the floor of this House, and particularly because he has moved seamlessly from his seat over there to his seat at the front in two days. Commissioner, we are very pleased to have you here.
Commissioner, that is the context of this question. You will hear lots of good contributions and interesting views from my colleagues, but I hope that you will make this one of your top priorities in your new role.
Secondly, on behalf of the committee, to have the chance essentially to put on record with this question our concern about the developments of online gambling, and indeed the gambling sector overall and some of the many uncertainties that are arising about the whole legislative regime for gambling within the internal market.
I know you will have a considerable in-tray already, Commissioner, but we hope very much that this will be an item that will be close to the top of your in-tray because it is an area which my committee has been very concerned about over the last five years. We have done a number of own-initiative studies and questions about it and indeed the author of our last major report, Mrs Schaldemose, will be speaking later and so we have a sustained interest in this topic.
As you all know, the Member States have also been meeting together regularly at Council level on various reflection groups about how to tackle the issue about the growth of online gambling in relation to our own countries’ gambling activities. I think I should make it clear first of all that this question does not in any way presuppose a new liberalisation of gambling markets or indeed not necessarily any new initiative in that direction. But the fact remains as you all know that the intense and growing popularity of online gambling is certainly also putting pressure on many national monopolies and existing schemes that may be state owned or state controlled, which raise very large amounts of revenue but are of concern to Member States.
What we are saying to you is that, in conjunction with this work that has been going on, there have been a number of references to the European Court of Justice; you will be aware of the details, and colleagues may talk about that later. I am not going to go through those, but from our perspective we see that the inconsistencies of some of the approaches to the Court of Justice are not in fact helping but if anything making the situation more complex and opaque than it was before. We also know that your services have issued a number of infringement cases in gambling issues, not all of them online, but many of them also relate to the whole question of freedom of operators to go and establish themselves in other countries.
All of these things now mean that it is absolutely the right time for the Commission to be collating this information, looking at the process of infringement proceedings, examining the issues raised by the Court of Justice judgments and coming out, first of all, with a clear strategy or clarification about where we are going to move forward and starting to deal with some of those inconsistencies.
From a consumer protection point of view, regulators also need to know where they stand about dealing with online gambling. Clearly, it can be regulated and it must be regulated – and, indeed, there are many good instances where online gambling providers are clearly committed to providing the tools and the controls to deal with problems of addictive gambling and so on – and, of course, there are issues about fraud and about problems there which we have also debated extensively in our committee. This is a consumer protection issue as well as being an internal market consistency issue.
Finally, I think we must also respect our citizens and the fact that many of them do want to access online gambling. I do not think there is any intention whatsoever to try and ban that – indeed it would be practically impossible – but there are major inconsistencies there. In some countries, for example, it is apparently illegal to take part in an online gambling contest with a company outside your own country. That cannot be right.
Another inconsistency which has been pointed out by one of my constituents is that if a British citizen accesses the British national lottery online from Spain and wins a prize, it will be illegal for the lottery to pay them in Spain. There are these inconsistencies that we have to tackle for the good of our citizens and the good of consumers."@en1
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