From The Daily Mail:
On high streets where many shops still lie empty as they recover from the worst recession in Britain since the 1930s, one type of business has continued to thrive in the economic gloom.
Bookmakers have swamped the UK's shopping parades – with numbers up 25 per cent since 2008 - and in one London borough, Newham, there are currently 82 - six per square mile.
Around almost every corner in this generally deprived part of East London are shops where people can stake £100 a spin on casino-style gambling machines, which are as addictive as crack cocaine.
Yesterday Newham Council was in court to defend its decision to block plans for a new Paddy Power shop, and if they win it could lead to hundreds of betting shop licences nationwide being turned down or revoked.
OK, is that really an abnormally large number of betting shops?
1. There are about 8,500 betting shops in the UK.
2. The UK has a population of about 62 million.
3. So that's about 1 betting shop per 7,300 people.
4. The borough of Newham has a population of about 310,000
5. 310,000 divided by 7,300 = 42.5
So that area has about twice as many bookies as you would expect, which surely is not abnormal, they're just at the far end of the bell curve.
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Footnote - in a former life, I had a client who'd run a couple of betting shops, he said it was fairly easy money but the biggest profit was getting a licence in the first place (which appears to be specific to the building, not personal to the applicant), which increased the value of those premises by about £100,000 (and that was 15 years ago).
So you could make a handsome turn by getting the licence and then selling the place. If the local council hands them out like confetti, then the value will be lower, but if it starts revoking them, the embedded value of the still valid licences will go up and up.
A whiff of something unwholesome
3 hours ago
11 comments:
Re footnote: worth remembering that the betting shop industry has changed almost beyond recognition in the last 15 years.
15 years ago bookies made money by taking bets on sports, as you might expect. Now, they make the majority of their money through fixed-odds terminals (fruit machines, effectively).
JB, that was fifteen years ago, I've no idea what the going rate is, but it illustrates the general principle.
Coral, William Hill, Labrokes, Jennings all have a presence in the "The acme of Kentish suburbia" (which is no longer actually in Kent but still a very nice place on the extremity of the south eastern edge of Greater London) where I reside. Population :13,651 (2011 census)
"if they win it could lead to hundreds of betting shop licences nationwide being turned down or revoked."
It wouldn't matter, because so many people are going to die young from smoking, drinking or eating too much, that there'd be too many betting shops anyway.
Maybe these areas have concentrations of poor people because they're crap with money, rather than brutally forced into betting shops?
BE, in that case, your patch also has twice as many betting shops as the average.
B, ah, but the full article explains that betting shops encourage violence and drinking, and probably comfort eating and smoking, so it's cause and effect, isn't it?
SB, cause and effect, cause and effect. But that wasn't the point of the post. The point was that the headline statistic of "six betting shops per square mile" is completely meaningless.
Yes, if we all gave up smoking, drinking, gambling, eating and, probably, sex, we'd all live for ever in peace, wouldn't we?
And yet very few people* want to shut down the National Lottery despite it being available to 16 year olds and accessible everywhere.
* OK - me
A few yrs ago my local shopping precinct was redeveloped. The very last shop to close was the bookies. And when the new centre was built, guess what was the 1st shop to open?
B, no.
TS, opium for the masses.
Pab, I'd guess the baker's or the newsagent's, they normally open very early. The bookies wouldn't have opened until 10 in the morning or so.
You'd be wrong - there is neither baker nor newsagent, indeed most of it is vacant.
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