Bereaved Children: Government Support

Debate between Laura Trott and Caroline Voaden

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.