Only last week it was announced by the Treasury that tax on bingo halls would be reduced by 10% to save jobs. And, bingo, a club has been saved already! Crown Bingo in Portsmouth was due to close in April this year, but the manager has announced that thanks to the tax reduction it will not close.
This is a great result, and a poignant reminder of what the Boost Bingo campaign was all about, the saving of bingo halls. Obviously the Bingo Association was more than a bit irate at the unfair nature of the tax compared with other gaming venues, but it wasn’t just a matter of principal.
Although not one of the larger clubs, 500 members is still 500 members who would sorely miss the club when it closed. This brings in the second angle of the motivation for cutting the bingo tax, an awareness of how important bingo is to certain sectors of the community, (and we’re not talking about Schapps’ bingo playing, hard drinking working classes…).
This truly is a vindication of all the hard work done by the Bingo Association, as without it, this bingo hall would have definitely closed as most likely many others would over the coming year. Obviously the tax reduction is no guarantee that the remaining 500 odd clubs in the UK will all stay open, however, as we’ve seen with this Southampton club, in some cases there will be a direct link between the budget, and many clubs’ futures.
The one big problem remaining is the ‘blue rinse’ image of bingo clubs, an image that many clubs have been trying to deal with over the past few years as the bingo population gets older, and online bingo becomes even more popular. To date initiatives have had little or no success in attracting a younger audience, and although many clubs are not solely populated by pensioners, some serious work needs to be done to get more young people through the doors if the long term future of bingo is to be assured.
This may be the next task for the Bingo Association, as now that all the main bingo chains are members, they have a wide pool of experience to draw from when it comes to the sharing and creation of new initiatives. The reduction in tax will hopefully loosen many clubs’ budget reins and allow them to commit cash to getting new players through the doors.
A good result for Crown Bingo, and hopefully we will be hearing more of these stories over the coming months. This may or may not be a grand turning point for the fortunes of land based bingo, but, with the economy on the turn (‘apparently’), we’ve got our fingers crossed. Original article.
