When Annie Ashton looks back on her final weeks with her husband, Luke, she wonders how often he gambled on his phone sitting beside her on the sofa, unnoticed.
Luke took his own life on 22 April 2021 aged 40. It was only after his death that Annie looked at his phone and discovered he had been gambling in secret through the pandemic.
“Sometimes it was over 12 hours’ worth of gambling. He was betting over 100 times a day, just using his phone,” she said.
A major inquest in Leicester on Wednesday will look at the role that gambling played in Luke’s death and whether more could have been done to prevent it.
Flutter, the parent company of Betfair where Annie says Luke did most of his betting, is officially included as an interested person. It is thought to be the first time a gambling company has been formally involved in an inquest, which will examine whether interventions by Betfair were adequate.
Annie, 41, is haunted by how easy it was for Luke to gamble in secret on his mobile. “We used to watch our soaps together. I would not have thought for a second that having a phone in your hand is strange,” she said.
Luke, who was on furlough from his job in a printing company, had a history of gambling problems but Annie thought he had stopped two years earlier. “Gambling destroyed him from the inside,” she said. “It controlled him, it consumed him and then it destroyed him. It is so dangerous.”
Luke had started betting on football at the weekend with friends, but Annie said the problem grew when a friend introduced him to exchange betting, where you bet on horses to lose as well as win.
In summer 2019, he said he couldn’t afford a birthday present for her and that money was tight. It was only when she found a letter about a loan for many thousands of pounds that he finally admitted the extent of his betting.
“He said he absolutely hated gambling,” she said. “He couldn’t believe how he had gambled so much. He was just trying to win back money to pay off the loans.”
When they cleared the debt and moved to a new house with their two children, Annie thought that chapter was over.
Luke opted out of marketing from Betfair after 2017 but received a monthly £5 free bet available to all users. Annie has campaigned against free bet offers and called for the introduction of a “Luke’s law” to ban them. “I just don’t see it as being something that should happen, especially when we know people are losing their lives and the amount of damage gambling actually does to someone.”
She said Luke “absolutely hated” adverts for gambling and would get upset when they came on, as they made curbing his addiction more difficult.
On 21 April 2021, Annie was in the classroom where she worked as a primary school teacher when her watch flashed up with a text from Luke. He was being sent to Scotland for delivery work and would be turning his phone off to save the battery.
When he had not returned that evening she put it down to the long drive. But when there was no sign of him the next morning, she began to panic. She called the police and his boss, who said he had never sent him to Scotland and that Luke had told him his van was off the road.
Eventually they were able to track his phone and ear buds to a flat in Yorkshire. When the police arrived they found him dead.
The family’s lawyer, Merry Varney at Leigh Day, said: “Gambling is something that people have had huge concerns about for a long period of time – and this only continues to grow. The inquest into Luke’s death provides an opportunity for a full and fearless investigation into Annie’s allegation that gambling caused her husband’s death and an opportunity for lessons to be learned and future lives to be protected.”
Ian Brown, the chief executive of Flutter UK&I, said: “We wish to reiterate our sincere condolences to Mrs Ashton and her family. We are truly sorry for their loss. Across Flutter UK&I, we are absolutely committed to safe gambling and to protecting all our customers. We hold ourselves to the very highest standards in the industry.
“We are constantly learning and updating our processes and we have made many changes over the past three years to make gambling with our brands even safer. We will, of course, incorporate any additional learnings from this tragic case into our controls.”
Annie met Luke on her first day at secondary school. He made her laugh so much that they got told off and she developed “a massive crush” on him but through school they were just friends.
Luke left to start work at 16 and she didn’t hear from him again until they found each other on Facebook 10 years later. After their first date, “we never really spent a day apart from that day onwards”.
She hopes the inquest will help give her some answers as to how the jovial man she fell in love with came to take his own life. “I just want Luke’s voice to be heard. I want them to know that he was just a normal person, and it’s happened to him, and more needs to be done to protect people that are suffering.”