Sarah Coombes

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) for securing this important debate. When I first became involved in this issue, the huge focus was on reducing the harm from FOBTs, and on the fact that people were losing hundreds if not thousands of pounds in a matter of minutes. That battle was won, but less than 10 years on it feels as though we are living in a different world. So many bets are placed on phones at all hours, encouraged by push notifications, email marketing and free bets. We have to do more to ensure that the regulation keeps up with reality. I want to focus on two things: how to make online gambling safer and what should happen in the event of a tragic suicide. Almost three quarters of callers to the national gambling helpline said that they had struggled with online gambling. Last week, a High Court judge found that a well-known gambling firm sent a problem gambler more than 1,300 marketing emails, despite rules stating that companies should not advertise to high-risk users. In a world in which the data that companies hold on each individual is so granular, I do not believe that they are doing anywhere near what they could to detect patterns of problem gambling and meaningfully intervene. The High Court ruling makes a link between customer protection and the suppression of marketing, yet the previous Government told us that there is no causal link between marketing and harm. I ask the Minister whether the Department will look again at the issue in the light of the ruling. What further safeguards could be put in place to protect vulnerable and at-risk players from marketing? Gambling addiction is hard to talk about. Many people’s gambling habits are a source of shame, which pushes the issue further into the dark. I met Liz and Charles —who is in the Public Gallery today—a long time ago. They have been powerful campaigners for families affected by suicide. Their charity is calling for an independent investigation into every gambling suicide so that lessons can be learned and fed into regulation and improved public information. Unfortunately, too many families who have lost loved ones through addiction tell stories of how hard it is to get information from the gambling companies. Will the Minister work with the Ministry of Justice to look at what happens when a death has occurred and at how licensing conditions can encourage operators to be more transparent? For many people, including me, gambling means an occasional each-way bet on the grand national or buying a scratchcard, but there are 168,000 people in the west midlands who say that problem gambling is devastatingly affecting their lives. For them and for their families, we need to do more.