A Terrible Decision

nick cowen, 30 December 2008

I cannot believe a recent appeal court decision that is reported in today’s newspapers. Earlier this month, an earlier decision of a lower court was upheld not to cancel debts of over £2,000,000 that a client of the bookmaker William Hill had incurred to it in 2006 through placing bets with it over the telephone.

The unsuccessful appellant had originally applied for cancellation of the debts on the grounds that, prior to incurring them, he had entered into a self-exclusion agreement with the bookmaker whereby it had undertaken not to accept any of his telephone bets for a six-month period. Apparently, the client had entered into the agreement because he knew himself to be a compulsive gambler, but, due to an internal administrative error by the bookmaker, it had failed to implement the agreement.
The appeal court decided the lower court had rightly refused to cancel the debts, accepting the original judge’s reasoning that, even had the bookmaker refused to accept the bets by which its client incurred them, he would most probably have still incurred similar debts with other bookmakers, given his gambling compulsion.
Reportedly, bookmakers throughout the country had been closely following the case because, had the decision gone the other way, they would have faced unnumerable suits from other clients seeking compensation for losses incurred by having placed unsuccessful bets with them.
Some have seen the client’s suit merely as another instance of victim culture, but I am not so sure. Frankly, the reasoning behind the judicial decision strikes me as absurd.
Suppose the appellant’s telephone bets with William Hill had been successful. Could it then rightly have refused to honour its debts to him on the grounds that, had it stuck by its agreement not to accept his bets, some other bookmaker would most probably now be owing its client the money that he was seeking from it? Surely, its failure to abide by its agreement not to accept bets from that client cannot be deemed irrelevant to whether he should be held to them? It is not as if the bookmaker actually incurred any real losses by its client not having honoured the debts that were incurred by his unsuccessfully having placed bets with it.
I find the judicial decision crazy, and would dearly welcome guidance from readers of this blog who are better versed than I am in the arcane workings of the legal mind and who can discern merits in the appeal court decision that I have so far failed to find.