SOME of you will have already read an article entitled “The Big Gamble”, by Tom Lamont in The Guardian, and if you haven’t, I recommend that you do.

Tom’s lengthy piece deals with the issue of single-manning in betting shops, and tells the harrowing story of Andrew Iacovou, murdered as he managed a branch of Ladbrokes in Morden, south London. Iacovou was alone, as is the norm these days in quiet shops, and lay undiscovered by customers playing on the shop’s FOBTs despite reportedly pressing the panic button behind the shop counter as he was being attacked.

Far from the Morden murder being the trigger to stop the practice of single-manning, the policy has been embraced by other firms since Iacovou’s death, and the risk of lone working has been played down. The argument put forward by advocates of single-manning, including by the odious Phillip Davies MP, is that forcing betting shops to operate with two or more staff in quiet periods would make the business model of the Licenced Betting Office (LBO) untenable, leading to the closure of shops and the loss of jobs, or in his own words: “We could end up, not with single-manned betting shops, but with no betting shops, and nobody in work.”

This is clearly a nonsense, but it’s true that there is a serious implication in cost terms of providing adequate staffing levels. From a cost-cutting perspective, modern betting shops are labour intensive at opening time and closing time and at periods of peak demand, but offer little for staff to do when things get less busy.

The busy periods now coincide, not with horseracing schedules as was once the case, but with demand for the betting terminals, which are very much the villain of most industry stories these days. In days of yore, those who attempted to rob betting shops were the same people who targeted post offices and the like, and usually unknown to staff, but it’s much more likely currently for attacks and robberies/attempted robberies to be perpetrated by customers who have lost money on FOBTs.

COMPUTERISATION

Firms like Ladbrokes were quick to realise that the need for cashiers to take bets and managers to settle them was effectively destroyed by the advent of computerisation in the late 1990s, when bets could be scanned and settled by machine, with only one person needed to process the dwindling number of greyhound and horse bets taken over the counter.

The realization was that the firms were effectively paying one member of staff to do nothing for large portions of the day, and the decision was made to trim staffing levels to the minimum required to manage the shop’s business, meaning that a large number of branches were deemed suitable for single-manning early in the morning and in the evening, the quietest times for business in most shops. From a financial viewpoint, such cuts are justified, but an important aspect of shop operations was left uncredited.

As someone who managed shops for Ladbrokes in London in the late 1990s, I can testify that while it can be an enjoyable job when working as part of a shop team, the experience of spending hours alone behind the counter is decidedly unsettling, even in the safest of areas.

Working with an experienced colleague in a betting shop was a job I enjoyed, especially in the old days of high slippage and manual settling. It was always busy, and keeping on top of managing the situation was an enjoyable challenge. You always seemed to deal with the same regular punters, but the ‘difficult’ customers always seemed to come out of the woodwork on days when a trainee cashier was sent to the shop.

Trainees meant uncertainty at the counter, fumbling of notes and invariably someone attempting a slow-count. How the chancers knew where to go for such a scenario was a mystery (some of the proper fraudsters used to arrive in London from Birmingham and further afield, and they always managed to find the shops which were vulnerable, be it by instinct or practice). I got to see a lot of those characters whose details were kept in lever arch files behind the counter when I single-manned in Baker Street, Wembley, Greenford and Notting Hill.

They soon moved their operations elsewhere, but the fact that their appearances coincided with days I was either alone or with one inexperienced cashier was uncanny. The other aspect of working alone which unnerved me was simply dealing with being on my own – a busy shop was better than one with few customers, and the lack of friendly interaction on the quietest nights was rather unnerving, even without the prospect of trouble.

VULNERABLE

Single-manned shops are likely to be targeted not just by betting-slip conmen, but by would-be robbers, not to mention those who simply want to prey on solitary young women, as a large percentage of lone workers are.

Many misogynistic cowards who threaten violence/rape on women are only empowered to do so because the women in question are rendered vulnerable by circumstance, and they wouldn’t dare voice their vile threats if challenged.

The policy of single-manning means that such people do not just run the risk of random and rare abuse, but as Judge Michael Chambers intimated in a case of a lone cashier left for dead in an attack at another Ladbrokes in Leicester in 2014, they will be specifically targeted because of the state of vulnerability in which their bosses knowingly place them.

As well as actual attacks, there are many more threats of physical and/or sexual violence which aren’t enacted but which are hugely distressing to those who receive them, and all the more so because the threats themselves are uttered in secret. Single-manning doesn’t simply represent an increased risk of violence and robbery, but is in itself debasing and psychologically destablising for those forced into solitary shift patterns.

It’s high time bookmaking firms put the safety and welfare of their staff ahead of profit, but who’s going to make them?