The House of Lords' rejection of Government proposals on gambling has been welcomed as a "historic victory" for local communities by the Evangelical Alliance.
The Evangelical Alliance has said it strongly condemns proposals to use casinos for regeneration as ineffective and unethical.
The alliance, which represents more than 1 million evangelicals in the UK, maintains that there is no public demand for more opportunities to gamble, and that local authorities have been seduced by "glitzy schemes" which offer only a short-term boom followed by long-term decline.
In the Lords debate, the Archbishop of Canterbury said he found the coupling of gambling with regeneration to be "quite baffling".
"I wonder whether the undoubted enthusiasm of some local authorities for the presence of casinos in their midst has something to do with the absence of other viable forms of regeneration policy proposed to them," he said. "Institutions that can encourage criminality and intensify irresponsibility are poor allies of social and civic regeneration."
He also voiced concern over assurances from the Government to assess the social impact of the casinos, saying, "The very language of 'test of social impact' fails to take seriously enough the fact that social impact is not something which comes and goes within 24 hours or which can be written out of the record by another piece of research.
"It also gives the unfortunate impression of business being somewhat unduly hustled in the parliamentary procedure."
