Betting and Wagering in UK Law

Legislation against, or controlling, gaming, wagering and betting is many centuries old in the United Kingdom. It is impossible to frame accurate definitions which can cover every such variety: attempts to do so may indeed be counter-productive, since each added precision merely provides an incentive to devise a variant which eludes it.

On the Claimant's case, there is a significant difference between a person who bets by way of business with a bookmaker and a person who bets by way of business on an exchange. The former does not, in my judgment, receive bets, even if by placing an assemblage of bets he is seeking to make a profit whatever the outcome of a race, and has never been generally regarded as being a bookmaker.

The question posed by the statute is not whether, in the course of a business, a person receives bets. The question is whether he carries on the business of receiving bets. Someone who operates a betting shop, or who has a stand at a race meeting, receives bets there. His business is that of receiving bets. The person who operates through a betting exchange may in the course of doing so find himself receiving a bet. But he does not carry on the business of receiving bets.

It would in my opinion fly in the face of common sense and be a travesty of justice if a problem gambler were able to attribute liability for his financial ruin to a particular bookmaker with whom he had made the relevant losses due to their failure to exclude him at his request, if he would, had he been excluded by that bookmaker, probably have ruined himself by betting with one or more of that bookmaker's competitors.

This is, in effect, a tax levied on bookmakers' profits to help fund and develop British horseracing. The income derived from the Levy is distributed by the British Racing Levy Board. There is, accordingly, no set off against payments paid to the BHB under their Data Agreements.

If a breach of contract is assumed and the acts complained of were taken in isolation then it seems to me that Mr Mallin's view of causation might be preferred. If one assumes the breach (and also the absence of a "such bets" issue) then a loss caused because bets were closed out some days later than they should have been would have been caused by the breach.

But the Jockey Club is not in its origin, its history, its constitution or (least of all) its membership a public body. It has not been woven into any system of governmental control of horseracing, perhaps because it has itself controlled horseracing so successfully that there has been no need for any such governmental system and such does not therefore exist. This has the result that while the Jockey Club's powers may be described as, in many ways, public they are in no sense governmental.