Racing: NAPP calls off the punters' crusade

The volunteers who have spent six years campaigning for punters have decided to give up the fight. Greg Wood believes that every backer in Britain was a loser yesterday.

The sums are incredible. Every year, British gamblers contribute almost pounds 1.4 billion pounds to the Treasury. It is punters who play the horses in betting shops who provide the annual pounds 50m or so which the Levy Board distributes to owners and courses to keep the entire industry afloat. And yet, when volunteers who founded the National Association for the Protection of Punters decided yesterday that the organisation could not go on, they had ``just enough money in the account'', according to Michael Singer, NAPP's chairman, ``to pay the final phone bill''.

The dozens of punters who contact NAPP every week with complaints against bookmakers will now have nowhere to turn. ``There are millions and millions of consumers who are being denied any form of regulation or protection whatsoever,'' Singer said yesterday. ``It's a national scandal that not a penny of the pounds 1.4bn which the Government receives from gambling is going back to protect the people providing it.''

The dissolution of NAPP seemed imminent a little over six months ago, but Singer was persuaded by various contacts in the then Opposition that a Labour government would make all the difference. They had asked the Levy Board - which, remember, is simply collecting and dishing out punters' money - for an annual grant of about pounds 250,000 to fund an office and up to five full-time staff (and if that sounds like a lot, it is worth noting that the Levy Board itself spend almost pounds 2m a year on administration).

The money would have allowed NAPP to continue campaigning, among other things, for a betting ombudsman to resolve disputes, a bonding scheme to protect punters when bookies go bust, and tighter guidelines the magistrates who issue betting permits.

At a meeting on Thursday with George Howarth at the Home Office, however, it quickly became clear that new Labour takes a distinctly old Tory approach to punter protection. ``We were asking for half of one per cent of the Levy collected,'' Singer said, ``but quite honestly it wouldn't have mattered if we'd asked for a fiver. With this government, you're supposed to give them money, and then you might get a meeting with the top man.''