Bishop of St Albans asks about suicides linked to gambling

The Bishop of St Albans received the following written answer on 4th September 2023:

The Lord Bishop of St Albans asked His Majesty’s Government how many deaths that occurred in England and Wales in the past four years mentioned gambling anywhere on the death certificate.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con, Cabinet Office):  The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the response attached from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority.

Dear Lord Bishop,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Questions asking how many deaths that occurred in England and Wales in the past four years mentioned gambling anywhere on the death certificate (HL9520).

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes statistics on deaths registered in England and Wales. Mortality statistics are compiled from information supplied when deaths are certified and registered as part of civil registration. Causes mentioned on the death certificate are converted to International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes, with the underlying cause of death defined as the disease or injury that initiated the events that directly lead to the death. At the ONS, we use the term “due to” to refer to the underlying cause of a death and the term “involving” where a cause is mentioned anywhere on the death certificate.

The ICD codes for gambling consist of:

• Z72.6- Gambling and betting

• F63.0- Pathological gambling

There were no deaths in the past four years involving gambling ICD-10 codes registered in England and Wales. While these codes exist, they are likely to be used only in the case of medically diagnosed gambling addiction. To identify some deaths involving gambling, we can also use the coroner’s text report from deaths registered involving suicide (ICD codes X60 to X84, Y10 to Y34). It is possible that more suicides were related to gambling, but this cannot be definitively stated, as not all the circumstances are necessarily known or reported in the death registration by the coroner. Table 2 shows the number of deaths where gambling was mentioned in the coroner’s text, that occurred from 2019 to 2022, and were registered by 31 December 2022 [2] , registered in England and Wales.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Sir Ian Diamond

Table 2: Numbers of deaths involving intentional self-harm and events of undetermined intent where gambling was mentioned in the coroner’s text, deaths occurring from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2022, England and Wales [4,7,8].

Year	Involving gambling
2019	4
2020	4
2021	1
2022	0

Source: Office for National Statistics

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