Children and Families Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Grand Committee

I know that the Minister is reasonable, I have a suspicion that he would have the support of the Prime Minister and I am pretty confident that he would have the support of his coalition partners. I look forward to his response and I beg to move.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, it cannot be right that it is a complete lottery for a grieving parent, probably in deep shock, in being entirely reliant on the good will of their employer. I shall give a slightly different example from the one given just now by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and focus on an extended illness of a child. Jane, a junior manager whom I know, had a three year-old with leukaemia. The charity she worked for believed itself to be a caring and reasonable organisation, but the head of the charity objected to allowing further compassionate leave as the child was dying or when the child died, nor did they want to give leave to prepare for the funeral. They said that the parent should take unpaid leave, having used up her annual leave to be with her child in hospital earlier in the year.

It took a little while for this charity to be persuaded that this was not the appropriate course and, some years on, as a result of the organisation changing its view, the junior manager, Jane, is still there. She found support from friends and colleagues absolutely vital, both in the time immediately after the bereavement and later when she returned to work. What the family really needed after the death was time—time to prepare for the funeral, time to help other children in the family to understand and time to prepare for a return to an ordinary working life after such an extraordinary event.

I think, despite the story, that this manager was lucky. At the very least we need guidelines for employers, but I have sympathy with the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Knight. As he has outlined, the costs are not too great either. Fortunately, losing a child is rare, so neither employers nor the Exchequer need worry that this will be a great cost. Also, as important as the humanitarian and caring approach is, parental bereavement leave is likely to help parents settle back into work, which in the long run will help both their employer and the state.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, it is very difficult to follow the well presented case that has been made for action in this area, but I want to spend two seconds paying tribute to Lucy Herd, who is in the audience today. I was privileged to accompany her when she came to see the Minister and the Bill team and very bravely went through some of the things that had happened to her in her life and how she had coped with them. One wonders whether people really can dig so deep, and yet that is what she did; she turned the tragedy of the death of her deeply loved son, Jack, into a campaign that she is still waging and which we have heard about from my noble friend Lord Knight.

This situation cannot be right. We need to do better than we currently do as a society that says it cares about these sorts of issues. There is clearly a cost, but there are also other things that could be done at least to open the situation for discussion. If this happens to you or to your nearest and dearest, you should not then find during the trauma of what is happening that the rules are so adverse and difficult that you do not know where you stand in terms of your relationship to your employer or to anyone else or their agencies. Given the complications of what would happen and the timescales involved—because if there are inquests and other things they will span over a long period—this situation is clearly unstable and has to be resolved. I hope that the Minister will be able to help us