Jake Richards

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) on securing this debate. I can be brief, because many of my points have already been made. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke), who mentioned her constituent Margaret, I have been an MP for only seven months. In this job we meet people who are going through difficult times, but I will never forget my meeting with my constituents Judith Bruney and her friend Liz. They came to my office in Dinnington to tell me about their sons, both of whom were hard-working, honourable, good young men trying to make their way in the world, but both of whom took their own life far too young as a result of their addiction to gambling. Chris, Judith’s son, was talented and hard-working but, without any of his close family knowing, he went spiralling into the depths of a gambling problem that in the end meant that he took his own life. I want to stress the point, which my hon. Friend has already made, that the trauma for the families did not end at that point. Afterwards, both Liz and Judith had to keep fighting for answers about how this happened and why this happened against an industry, and frankly a system, that too often closes doors, shuts down and does not look into the very important issues affecting hundreds or thousands of people every year. I urge the Government and the Minister to work with the Ministry of Justice in particular to look at ways in which we can empower coroners’ courts, and indeed place responsibilities on them, to look into these issues in a robust and rigorous manner. At the moment, we simply do not know the scale of the problem. We have heard a lot of statistics in this debate, but they vary because we just do not know what we are dealing with. Until we do, we cannot properly solve it.