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• A review of the alternative approaches to regional casino-led regeneration

Cities and regions

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Summary

This review has been undertaken in response to the request from the Prime Minister and aims to examine the evidence of whether regional casinos are the best way to regenerate specific deprived areas.

The review highlights the difficulty in establishing the evidence base for the generic benefits of casinos because the source material is strongly influenced by specific location factors, and by the underpinning purpose of individual pieces of research. In particular, there are uncertainties:

• about the scale of the benefits of a regional casino for job creation
• about the wider benefits to an area from multiplier effects
• about the degree of additionality a casino would bring to existing activities
• about the effects of leakage - where new jobs are filled by commuters not locals limiting the benefits to the immediate area of the casino

In addition, the review finds that as with most regeneration projects, there are economic and social costs associated with casino-led regeneration, and in the case a regional casino there are potentially significant costs that would arise from an increase in compulsive gambling.

The review does recognise that the unique nature of a regional casino makes it difficult for any one alternative regeneration approach to achieve the same scale of benefits. But the difference could be eliminated if a number of alternatives are packaged together, particularly when the potential economic and social costs are factored in.

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• A review of the alternative approaches to regional casino-led regeneration
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