Bereavement Leave: Loss of a Child

David Linden Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton)—I deliberately say my hon. Friend, knowing that his vote in Newton Mearns will probably go down as a result of being friends with the Scottish nationalists—on securing the debate. It is a pleasure to serve with him on the APPG for children who need palliative care. I pay tribute, as he has, to Together for Short Lives for providing the secretariat and for the campaigning work it does on this very emotive issue.

As my colleague suggested, the pain of losing a child is unimaginable. I spoke about it in the summer Adjournment debate before recess, and I pay particular tribute to the hon. Members for Colchester (Will Quince) and Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach), and, indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson), who have all spoken publicly and very bravely about their own experiences. It takes an awful lot of courage to do that. I very much welcome the opportunity to take part in the debate. I will try not to echo too much of what the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire said; I will raise a few points around bereavement leave before broadening the debate out a little. As the hon. Gentleman said, we applied for the debate at a time before paid bereavement leave was included in the Gracious Speech. I congratulate the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) on securing his private Member’s Bill and I absolutely look forward to being there with him and voting for it when it comes before the House.

The hon. Member for East Renfrewshire outlined how self-employment might not be within the scope of the Bill, and I understand that there might be reasons for that, but we need to find a way, perhaps via the Department for Work and Pensions, to ensure that some sort of equivalent financial benefit for the self-employed makes its way into the Bill. We know that almost 5 million people in the UK are self-employed, which is the highest number on record. As the economy begins to change and evolve, that number will obviously only get higher, so we need to be mindful of that when drafting the legislation.

I echo much of what the hon. Gentleman said about bereavement support. I know that some bereavement support has been found to be patchy, particularly in England. I am intrigued to see how Scotland’s health boards compare when we get those data via the freedom of information request that I know Together for Short Lives has submitted. One area of good practice in Scotland is the funding of children’s hospices. We have taken a distinctly different route. We have increased funding for children’s hospices to parity with adult hospices, which has been very much welcomed across the sector.

Although I am not an English MP, I encourage Her Majesty’s Government to consider similar moves to address inequitable funding. In England last year, local authority contributions to the cost of providing children’s palliative care in the voluntary sector dropped by 61%, while the cost of providing complex care actually increased by 10%. Before I say any more on palliative care, I declare an interest: my mother is employed by Icare Scotland, which provides palliative care for children and babies across west central Scotland. At this juncture, I pay tribute not only to my mother, but to the staff and volunteers. It takes a really special kind of person to dedicate their lives to doing that job.

That leads me on quite nicely to my next point, about some of the challenges in investing in children’s palliative care, particularly in the workforce. Statistics show that 11% of children’s hospice posts are currently vacant, which is a real issue that the Scottish Government, the Welsh Assembly Government, the Northern Ireland Executive and the UK Government have to look at. How do we fill some of those vacancies and solve some of the challenges in workforce supply?

I also pay tribute to CHAS—Children’s Hospices Across Scotland. It is a charity that provides the only hospice services in Scotland for children and young people with life-shortening conditions for which there is no known cure. It runs two children’s hospices—Rachel House in Kinross and Robin House in Balloch—as well as a home care service. It supports 415 families across Scotland, but can currently provide support for only one in three families who require it. I am delighted to support CHAS by taking part in the great Scottish run next month.

I very much echo Together for Short Lives in its letter to the Prime Minister—I do not know whether it has been answered yet—calling a national strategy on children’s palliative care and for quite rightly pointing out that the system needs to be a bit more joined up. We cannot have parents who have experienced the loss of a child having to have that same conversation over and over again. I think any national strategy could tease some of that out.

One issue that I had not planned to touch on is burial fees—it is more pertinent to Scotland, so I hope the House will indulge me for a few moments. I appreciate that it is a very difficult topic, but there are inconsistent burial fees across Scotland. I am ashamed to say that my local authority of Glasgow is the most expensive for burying children. It costs £637 for the burial of a child aged between seven and 15 and £426 for those aged one to five. We have 32 local authorities in Scotland and some do not charge at all. As with many of the points made by the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire, the burying of a child is an incredibly difficult time for some families, and we need to move away from burial fees. I join him in calling on all 32 local authorities to scrap these outrageous charges.

The final item I will speak about is one on which I have spoken quite a few times since entering Parliament in June: the baby benefit bar. Some 49,000 families across the UK have a child with a life-limiting or life-shortening condition. There is currently a cruel anomaly within the Department for Work and Pensions, whereby the mobility component of the disability living allowance is not paid to children under three. That impacts on around 2,700 families, but it could be made right with the stroke of a pen. It is an inconsistency in Government policy. Once again, I call on the Government to take action—we are talking about approximately £8 million. Ultimately, time is not on the side of these families, so the best thing we can do is to be on their side. I very much hope that when the Minister sums up, she can give us some good news about ending the baby benefit bar.