Bereaved families gather at Westminster

On Wednesday 22 January, forty bereaved family members gathered at Westminster for GwL’s annual Parliamentary event.

Families were joined by more than 40 parliamentarians and many others, including public health professionals, researchers, government officials and advisors.

With a (relatively) new Labour government, there were lots of new faces in the room to hear the families’ call for every gambling death to be investigated so that lessons can be learned.

Abtisam Mohamed MP, who kindly hosted the event, opened with a personal and powerful speech highlighting the urgent need for reform, before handing over to our co-founder Liz Ritchie who called on the Government to support our call for every death to be investigated and lessons learned.

Liz said: “It’s hard to describe the level of grief and anger in this room from families that we still have to be here. Last year hundreds more people, most of them young, took their lives because of predatory gambling.”

“And next year we’ll be back again, and hundreds more people who are alive now will be dead unless systematic lessons are learned about the kind of gambling that precedes a suicide and about the misleading information that is currently available to the public.” 

Baroness Twycross, the gambling minister at DCMS, spoke about reform to date including the statutory levy. She was followed by Andrew Gwynne MP, the Minister for Public Health and Prevention at DHSC. 

Minister Gwynne’s speech placed gambling suicide firmly in the public health arena and suggested a shift in approach from the Government with a much clearer and more central role for the health department.

He said: “That should be our aim and desire – no more deaths from gambling harm. Let’s make that a reality.”

Finally, Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, the National Clinical Advisor on Gambling Harms, gave a strong speech supporting our call for every gambling death to be properly investigated.

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