Bereaved Children: Government Support

Laura Trott Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) for her powerful speech introducing the debate and for all her work on this subject.

It is normal in debates in this Chamber to bring the stories of our constituents to illustrate the issue, but today I am going to share my story as well. In 2002, I had a five-month-old baby and a two-year-old toddler, and my beloved husband was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer. A year later, he died, just a week before Ellie’s fourth birthday and Laura was 17 months old. You cannot explain to a baby or a four-year-old what death means. One day their parent is there, the next he is gone. I remember Laura, who had just learned to say the word “Dadda”, going round the house opening the doors, going “Dadda, Dadda”, because she could not find him. I did not really know anything about the impact of bereavement on children, but in the last 20 years, I have learned quite a lot.

In the UK, around 120 children are bereaved of a parent every day—[Interruption.]

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

The hon. Member is making a powerful speech, and we are all honoured to hear it.

[Caroline Voaden]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her intervention.

In the UK, around 120 children are bereaved of a parent every day. By age 16, approximately one in 20 young people in the UK will have experienced the death of a parent. I became the chair of the Widowed and Young organisation and met loads of kids and their parents through that work, many of whom I am still friends with today. I saw the impact on scores of children who had lost their mum or dad. Thousands more in the UK have lost a sibling, which is also a profound grief for children, which is little understood. I saw these children grow up and adjust to their lost; the progress they made and then the setbacks; the challenges with attachment, loss, fear and abandonment; the issues with friendships and relationships; struggles with school; dangerous coping mechanisms and risk-taking in teenage years; mental health challenges; anger; intense emotions and anxiety. Just for the sake of my daughters, that is not all related to them.

While children are navigating all of that, the challenge of becoming a single parent at exactly the same moment that you are bereaved cannot be overstated, and that is compounded exponentially when the bereavement is sudden and unexpected. The day my husband died, my children came home from nursery and needed me to be the same reliable, loving, stable mum they knew—up at 7 the next day needing their breakfast, and so it went on. There is not much time to navigate your own grief in all of that.

On top of that is the loss of income. The challenge of holding down a job, bringing in a wage, while being a grieving single parent to grieving children is immense, as are the unaffordable costs of childcare that enable you to go to work at all. But in a way, I was lucky, because I was bereaved before 2017 and I received the widowed parent’s allowance—a payment that was funded by the national insurance contributions that my husband Nick had made during 20 years of full-time work, contributions designed to pay into a system that is meant to pay out when needed. He will never receive a state pension.

What difference did the widowed parent’s allowance make? It made all the difference. It allowed me to work part time. It allowed me to be present for my children, to help keep them stable while the world around them felt unsafe and scary. It made a part-time income go further. It helped pay for childcare and a few out-of-school activities so my children could live the same life as their peers. It also helped pay for the holiday clubs that they had no choice but to go to so that I could go to work —and they did not always want to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

May I say what a privilege it has been to be part of this debate, and how much I admire all those who have spoken about their personal stories? I do not underestimate for a second how difficult it is, but suffering a catastrophic event and trying to make other people’s lives better is about the most admirable thing someone can do.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) on securing the debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for putting it in place. She is so self-evidently right in what she says: there needs to be a general strategy, and we need data to be made available. It is worth thinking about why those things have not happened to date, and making suggestions about how we can overcome those barriers in future.

Governments have historically been bad at cross-departmental data collection, as we know. That has been grappled with over time, but there has been no clear solution to date. I have seen such working function more effectively on occasion, such as in cross-departmental working committees on something specific. I offer that up to the Minister as a suggestion that might work. For example, in recent years there have been changes to implement a “no wrong door” policy on reporting a death. That took a lot of time. Previously, when reporting a death, as I am sure many in this Chamber have unfortunately had to do, people had to go to multiple Government Departments before the death could be recognised. That has been changed for the better, and I hope that something similar could be adopted in this case.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke), whose APPG does incredible work on these matters, mentioned good practice in schools. We should think about how to collate it more systematically. We are quite effective when it comes to education policy, through the Education Endowment Foundation, which picks up what works from an academic perspective and shares good practice among schools. By and large, that is missing in the special educational needs and disabilities space, but it is also missing here. We have heard about good practice, which I am sure exists up and down the country—the hon. Lady mentioned Oakwood primary school—but there is nowhere to share it effectively. Will the Department think about how to take that forward? I am sure that there will be guidance, and I am just as sure that it could be made better.

On overall data collection, when a death is reported, it is linked to one individual rather than to a wider database. Change will need to be made on that, and the referral to the pathway is critical, as the hon. Member for Edinburgh West said. She also mentioned that that now happens in cases of suicide. I hope the Minister will take that up today, because we have seen that it can work. It may take time, and I think we all acknowledge that government is difficult—it is not easy to wrangle different Departments together—but that could definitely be taken forward.

Before preparing for this debate, I had not realised what the figures are for the outcomes for bereaved children, and I was quite shocked. If we have not gone through this catastrophic event, it is too easy to overlook the impact it has on young people. The statistic that the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) gave about the number of offenders who have suffered a bereavement was shocking. I hope and believe that this will be even more grist to the mill for the Education Minister to try to deal with this, because it is one of many areas across Government where early intervention—helping people—is not only the right thing to do but will benefit us and wider society.

What we have heard today is that many children who go through this have amazing families—we have some examples of those amazing families here today—and they have people around them who will support them, help them and do whatever they can to ameliorate this catastrophic incident. But that is not true of every family. Of course, the state will miss things, but if we can set up a system that minimises the impact of this catastrophic event on young people, that is the right thing to do.

I am very grateful to be part of this House today. It is these types of debate that take place in a relatively empty Chamber on a Thursday afternoon that can really make a difference to young people across the country. We have a very good Minister here, and I am sure he is about to tell us how he is going to sort this all out after many years. I commend the many voices who have spoken up today, and I am grateful to have been here for it.