Bingo: New taxes kill UK's passion for bingo night
'Two and four, twenty-four ... Seven and nine, seventy-nine ... All the sevens, seventy-seven!'
The voice belongs to Dawn Milton, 'caller' for the past eight years at the Harlow Bingo Club in Essex. Blonde and boisterous, these days she is also agitated and apprehensive. Nearly 100 bingo clubs around Britain have shut their doors in the past three years - more than a dozen since the start of this year. Milton can't help worrying how the trend will affect even Harlow, one of the most successful bingo clubs. It is not just a business, she insists, but provides a 'safe, sociable night out' for its thousands of bingo members.
More than three million people across the country regularly play bingo, a pastime with its roots in the tombola fund-raisers of nearly a century ago. But the major commercial chains such as Gala Bingo and Rank's Mecca bingo have seen their profits slashed by political and economic constraints - with little sign until recently that the bingo industry's cries for help are being heard in Whitehall.
'The smoking ban hit us badly,' says Milton, 'particularly when the cold weather set in last winter.' But the bingo industry bosses' main gripe is that, alone among gaming businesses, bingo faces 'double taxation' - the gambling profits' levy as well as VAT. And under the government's new gambling legislation, bingo halls have also had to cut back drastically on the number of their profitable £500 jackpot machines.
While small crowds clustered around the few remaining bingo machines last Sunday evening, the key attraction was still in the main hall, as Milton called out the bingo numbers, the nearly 900 bingo players hunched over their booklets ticked off hits with felt-tip markers, winners shouted in excitement and near-winners gasped as she moved on to the next line. 'Yes, it's partly about winning money,' Milton said. 'But it's more than that. We're the only club for miles around, and for some of our regular bingo members it is also being part of a community.'
A study by the Henley Centre research group, commissioned last year by the Bingo Association to chart the effects of the closure of bingo clubs in Scotland and the Midlands, found that particularly among older women whose small local bingo clubs had closed there was a major 'social' effect. 'For regular bingo members, going out to bingo is the primary, and sometimes only, leisure activity out of the house,' it concluded. 'While money is a key trigger to begin playing and remains an important motivation, the drive to play bingo regularly is largely orientated around a need for social interaction and belonging.'
The leading academic expert on bingo, Dr Carolyn Downs of Manchester Metropolitan University, is sceptical about 'overstating' its social role. But she agrees that as a 'regular' activity, particularly among older women, 'it is a place where they can meet their friends, and in those settings bingo perhaps plays a very different role'.
Sustaining that social lifeline amid the club closures has suddenly landed the government with a new headache after the backbench rebellion over abolition of the 10p tax rate - underscored by the Conservative capture of Harlow amid the Labour meltdown in local elections. Though pundits called the Tory victory a shock result, anyone who had taken the political temperature at the previous Sunday's bingo night in Harlow would have seen it coming. The 10p tax 'betrayal' was the main complaint, but for many members - in a town whose council the Tories failed to win even under Thatcher- it was seen as part of a pattern of assaults alongside the smoking ban and the perceived lack of support for their bingo club.
On the eve of the elections, the Sports Minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, hinted in a speech to the Bingo Association's annual meeting at a possible loosening on the number of £500 jackpot machines to shore up bingo clubs' finances.
