Children and Bereavement

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petitions 636718 and 624185 relating to children and bereavement.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. This is my first time opening a debate as a new member of the Petitions Committee; I am delighted to speak to the two incredibly important petitions. Before I begin, I want to thank the House of Commons staff for enabling me to engage proactively with the petitioners, charities, advocates, representatives and supporters involved in both petitions. I feel privileged to stand here today as an advocate for the campaigners who have worked tirelessly for years to get results on these vital matters. This debate takes place during National Grief Awareness week, which is run by the Good Grief Trust, who chose this year’s theme: shine a light. That is exactly what I hope to do today in this debate.

First, I would like to set out the two matters at hand before I make the case for each. Crucial in all of this is that both petitions go hand in hand in with the same diagnosis and cure, which I will describe. I will delve into it further towards the end of my speech. I want to start with the petition entitled, “Record the number of bereaved children to ensure they are supported”. That might not be something we would consider every day, but currently we do not know how many bereaved children there are in the UK right now. The petition argues:

“If we don’t know the true scale of childhood bereavement, the services that exist to help are unable to proactively offer the support that children and their families need to cope with their grief. Without support, unresolved grief in young people can lead to an increased risk of youth offending, family breakdown, underachievement in education and employment and long-term mental health conditions.”

I want to thank Winston’s Wish and its inspiring ambassador, Mark Lemon, for the work that they have done submitting the petition and campaigning for it over the years. One of the fundamental reasons why I am in favour of it is Mark’s own personal story, which I am deeply grateful to be able to share on his behalf today. At age 12, Mark experienced the horrific murder of his father. With nothing registered and no real support around at the time, Mark received no help to cope with that traumatic incident or adjust to the massive impact that the loss had on his life until his 20s. Mark is here today, and he argues that recording the number of children in the household when a death is registered could help thousands of bereaved children and ensure that services can better plan, reach out to families and offer much-needed support. Mark is working hard to make sure that no child faces the isolation he did after such devastation, which is hard for any of us to fathom even as adults.

Setting aside the emotional aspect of the argument, I support the practicalities of the proposal. From service delivery to charities, local councils and schools, how can anybody work to tackle the consequences of childhood bereavement if no one knows where it is occurring in the first place?

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

I concur exactly with everything the hon. Member has said. It is a cause close to my own heart. In fact, I have a private Member’s Bill on this very subject due to be considered in July. Does he agree with me that this is something the Government should look at and help to happen, because it should not need legislation?

[Kevin Bonavia]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. Obviously, there are things that can be done through law. There are things that are done through good practice and guidelines, and I am sure we will hear from my hon. Friend the Minister in due course as to what can be done. If it needs legislation I am sure she will consider that, but we should do all that we can to encourage the Government to take whatever steps they can to help achieve the aims of the petitions.

On the first petition about collecting data, a simple change would be to support registrars to collect the data when a death is registered while protecting the anonymity and data of the family. That seems achievable without being overly invasive. After all, it would simply be an option, and it would indicate where bodies need to target their support. Winston’s Wish, the child bereavement charity, has regular get-togethers with young people so they can share their stories of grief with one another. Imagine how that data could transform where it allocates its resources, time and effort. It could be transformational for our kids.

From speaking to colleagues across the House, including the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine), who brought a debate on this subject to Westminster Hall earlier this year, it is clear that such a move could attract cross-party consensus. I therefore ask my hon. Friend the Minister what legislation would be needed to enact the change permitting registrars to collect data on the number of bereaved children at the point of registering the death. If enacted, what support and training could be given to registrars so they can direct families who register bereaved children towards charities and bodies that can help?

The previous Government essentially said, “We won’t do this, because it is not the done thing,” and pointed people towards the support that schools and charities can give. Let us make it the done thing, because it would help schools and charities to do their jobs in the first place.

The second, and equally important, petition argues that we should add content on death, dying and bereavement to the national curriculum. It states that, under compulsory relationships education, schools should be required to provide age-appropriate education to help children understand death as a part of life:

“Talking about death can be helpful for children and issues of bereavement should be compulsory learning for children in preparation for life as an adult. Children are taught how life begins through the national curriculum and similarly we should not hide from equipping children with the skills to comprehend death. Children must be provided with the skills to comprehend loss and to prepare for the emotions and feelings that accompany a bereavement which at some point, we all have to face.”

I commend the research, testimony and briefings from the childhood bereavement network and the National Children’s Bureau, which have compelled me, emotionally and logically, to support these changes. I also want to highlight the work of the petition creator, John Adams, past president of the National Association of Funeral Directors, whose membership includes more than 4,000 funeral homes. He has used his story of grief as a young child as a motivator to call for these changes, which will help all other children in need.

--- Later in debate ---

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. This is something like the fifth debate on this subject that I have taken part in since I became an MP in 2017, and it is more than two years since I asked the then Leader of the House whether we could have a debate on it. During those two and a half years, I have repeatedly asked the Government to look at a register for bereaved children, because it was suggested to me by Winston’s Wish.

I first thought about and became aware of this issue in a conversation with my sister over lunch. My sister, who is now 50, said to me, “Do you remember how when dad died”—when she was eight—“we never really saw anybody from social services? Nobody came to see us and nothing happened.” I said, “Yeah, that’s right, because we had never been in contact with social services. They didn’t think we needed them. Do you know it’s still the same?” I think a friend’s partner had died and I realised that nothing had changed in 40 years, and I thought that was ridiculous.

I spoke to staff at Winston’s Wish and they said, “Yeah, the problem is that we know how many children are bereaved every year. We know they are out there and we have the support networks to help them. We have the facilities. We have peers they can talk to who will appreciate it”—as the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) said—“but the charities and organisations do not know how to get in touch with the children because it is not recorded where they are.” The families do not know how to get in touch with the support networks because, when they go to record a death, no one asks, “Do you need help for a child?” It should be simple. That is why I think that a record, as the petition calls for, is the best way forward.

To turn briefly to other subjects, it is vital to teach about bereavement and loss in school—that is the role that schools have played—but, with respect to Members from the previous Government, they seemed to think that only schools should have responsibility. I do not think that is what children or their parents want. Children who have lost a parent, a grandparent, a friend’s parent or a sibling need help at times when the school is not available—at night, when they are lonely or upset, or when they are a teenager and do not know who to turn to for advice. That is when they need their peers. Often, they do not want to talk to the school, or they might move school and not know many people.

The idea is to have a register, a simple box-ticking exercise to say, when a death is recorded, that there is a child who may be affected, with paperwork handed out —the leaflets, the contacts—and that would not mean letting that data be public. There would never have to be any publication of the data; it would simply be putting people who need the help in touch with the people who can offer that help. If we do not do that, we face the situation that the hon. Member for Stevenage talked about: adults who went through a traumatic experience as a child never getting the help they need to get over it fully, so that it comes back when they are adults. That can get them involved in crime or drugs, or give them difficulty forming personal relationships.

When I spoke to one of the charities involved with adults bereaved as children, one of its psychologists said to me, “You do realise you could be opening a whole can of worms for yourself. You might not have dealt with this quite as well as you thought you did.” I think she is wrong, but we never know—it does come back in later life. It can contribute to the burden on the NHS or problems in the economy. If we will not look only at the huge moral and compassionate case for having this register, we should look at the economic one and see that that backs up the moral and compassionate case.

I thank the hon. Member for Stevenage for how he introduced both petitions, and I say to the Government: please, before my private Member’s Bill comes before the House in July, may we come up with a way of saving so many children in this country going through any more long-term pain? The help is there for them—charities such as Winston’s Wish want to help them, but they just do not know where those children are.