The barrister for gambling company Admiral told a Putney licensing hearing on Thursday night that most of the residents who objected to its gambling arcade plan simply have “an anti-gambling stance.” The two residents who also spoke at the meeting had stressed that wasn’t true.
No decision was reached. Wandsworth’s licensing sub-committee retired to deliberate after more than an hour of evidence on Luxury Leisure’s application for a 24-hour adult gaming centre at 160-162 Putney High Street: 58 residents wrote in to object. A written decision, with appeal rights attached, is due by next Thursday.
Under direct questioning, several parts of Admiral’s written case came apart a little: an out-of-date safety certificate in its own papers, a “staff are automatically dismissed” claim softened to roughly 80% of cases, an admission that local police contact had gone unanswered. None of it changes the legal test the committee actually has to apply. But it did show a gap between the case on paper and the case in the room.
“An anti-gambling stance”
Gary Grant, the barrister opening for Admiral, used the phrase twice, once at the start of his submission and once again at the close. Most of the 58 people who wrote in to object, he told the panel, were really just against gambling in principle rather than raising anything the committee could weigh.
The two residents who spoke that night didn’t sound like it.
Liz Bridge, a former HMP Wandsworth chaplain, told the panel directly: “I am quite satisfied that it’s a clean, safe premises… clean gambling. But I am very worried about the vulnerable people.” Anna Wojcik, a mother of two, went further: “I don’t doubt that they are an experienced and responsible operator… I’m not opposed to gambling as a lawful activity and I’m not questioning the professionalism of this operator.” She asked the panel not to dismiss residents’ “lived experience and genuine concerns” simply because they “cannot be expressed as statistics.”
Grant’s closing submission returned to the same framing regardless: “a lot of else that we’ve heard… it’s an anti-gambling stance.”
The numbers, checked live
Admiral’s written case leans heavily on its safeguarding record: the company told the panel it logs around 170,000 “interactions” with customers a year across its 300 venues, plus roughly 150 to 160 self-exclusions a week.
Bridge did the arithmetic out loud. “On the back of a fag packet here, I think that’s 600 each, which is about 10 a week. That is a challenge and a half every day,” she said of the interactions figure. On self-exclusions: “You said that 150 to 160 people were excluded in a week from 300 venues. That is less than a half a person from each venue.”
She drew on her own background to explain why she found the numbers thin. “I have been a chaplain in Wandsworth Prison. I know how many men in Wandsworth Prison are vulnerable, and who end up standing on the front of the railway station or at the bus stops with nowhere to go,” she said. “Those rates of challenge and those rates of interaction are not high.”
What came apart under questioning
The written case wobbled in smaller ways too. A G4 responsible-gambling accreditation certificate in the committee’s own supplementary papers had expired; Mark Thompson, Admiral’s risk and compliance director, apologised and said the underlying accreditation had actually been renewed in March. It was a paperwork error, not a lapse in the accreditation itself. But it was the document the committee and the public had in front of them.
Gary Grant’s opening claim that a staff member who fails a Think25 age-verification check “is automatically dismissed” didn’t survive questioning either. Sean Hooper, Admiral’s regional operations director, corrected it: “I would have to just slightly correct that. We don’t instantly dismiss people, we have to go through investigation and disciplinary process… I think probably 80% of those cases result in dismissal of at least one member of staff.”
Thompson also admitted, when asked, that outreach to local police over this specific site hadn’t gone anywhere: “I have reached out to the local police here and had no response to this point.”
And when Cllr Matthew Tiller asked whether there was any location Admiral wouldn’t open a venue in, Hooper couldn’t give one: “I can’t think of one where we have an AGC (Adult Gaming Centre) next door to a school, for instance, that we may do, but I can’t think of one.” Thompson filled the gap: “I think the point is that the decisions are made commercially. We want to be where there’s demand and it’s commercially viable.”
Putney MP Fleur Anderson attended the hearing to oppose the application. Her central argument challenged Admiral’s claim that an absence of recorded harm at existing venues means an absence of risk: “Someone with a gambling problem doesn’t relapse every time they walk past a gambling venue… the constant accessibility and visibility is right there waiting.”
She also pointed to the scale of opposition. “Demonstrated by the fact that 624 people objected to the proposal and the committee has received 58 objections,” she said. “But I think you could easily get 58 more objections if you just went out any time onto Putney High Street or the surrounding streets.”
What happens next
None of what came out under questioning touches the legal test that will actually decide this. Under the Gambling Act 2005, councils are required to “aim to permit” gambling premises unless there’s specific evidence against one of three licensing objectives: crime and disorder, fair gambling, and protecting children and vulnerable people. The clustering law that isn’t in force yet remained the elephant in the room throughout: it has passed into law, but the guidance needed to actually use it hasn’t been published, and Wandsworth hasn’t adopted it.
That leaves the panel’s written decision, due by 16 July, resting on the same narrow legal ground the series has tracked since January, however the hearing itself looked on the night.
