In a response to government plans to change the taxation of pub quiz and games machines like Cluedo, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Monopoly, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) says it believes that tax revenues gained from the move will be far outweighed by the tax lost.

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs wish to reclassify Skills with Prizes (SWP) machines as gambling machines, making them liable for gaming machine tax. It also wants to make the tax retrospective for the last three years. SWP machines have always been recognised as distinct and different from gambling machines such as fruit machines. Gambling machines, where chance is the deciding factor on whether a player wins a cash payout, have always been covered by Amusement Machine Licence Duty.

The BBPA calculates that, with an estimated 35,000 SWP machines being used in the UK, the cost to the industry of the proposed tax will be £85m, or £2,500 per pub. It argues that the move will result in fewer people playing SWP machines for entertainment and more people playing fruit machines to gamble; the possibility of many UK companies manufacturing SWP machines going out of business, with a consequent loss of jobs; and putting pubs - currently closing at the rate of around 39 a week - and the jobs of people employed in them under further threat.

Brigid Simmonds, chief executive of the BBPA said, "The perverse result of this tax change will be to switch more people onto gambling as quiz machines are switched off across Britain. That cannot be a sensible or sustainable public policy outcome for government." BBPA members are said to account for 98 per cent of the beer brewed in the UK and own nearly two thirds of Britain's 52,500 pubs.