Covid-19: Day of Reflection

Lord Bishop of London Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Lord Bishop of London]

To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the COVID-19 Day of Reflection, what steps they are taking to improve support offered to people bereaved as a result of COVID-19.

[The Lord Bishop of London]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the former chair of the UK Commission on Bereavement and other interests as set out in the register. Though we are small in number, I am grateful for the opportunity to hold this debate. I am aware that reflection on the impact of Covid-19 is no longer a particularly attractive subject, but I feel strongly that the impact of this world-changing event will continue to be felt in the years to come.

In our nation’s living memory, there has not been a moment in which so many of us have experienced bereavement at the same time. Over the course of 2020 and 2021 alone, there were an additional 750,000 deaths over what would ordinarily be expected based on the previous five-year period. By the end of 2022, an estimated 16,700 children and young people in the UK had been bereaved of their parent or a primary caregiver through the deaths associated with the pandemic.

On Sunday 9 March, we marked five years since the start of the pandemic with a day of reflection, on which communities up and down the country remembered our national and personal loss. Many of these wounds are still raw, and the BBC reported that sobbing could be heard at the National Covid Memorial Wall. This afternoon, I will discuss the particular disruption to bereavement during the pandemic and the long-term impacts of restricted bereavement.

The UK Commission on Bereavement was launched in June 2021 and, in October 2022, we produced our report, Bereavement Is Everyone’s Business. The report identified a number of key ways that the pandemic disrupted the grieving process of those bereaved. The first, and perhaps the most obvious, is funerals. Restrictions meant that there were delays, restrictions in numbers, social distancing of attendees and changes to collective end-of-life rituals: wakes, shivahs, collective recitation at home, nine nights, and the viewing and embalming of bodies at home were not possible.

As with many aspects of the pandemic, not everyone’s experience was the same. Many religious and ethnic-minority groups faced more significant barriers to organising funerals. Many people reported that finding funeral directors or bereavement organisations with culturally appropriate funeral services was difficult, and that not being able to participate in usual rituals prevented them grieving properly.

Being able to access a meaningful and affordable funeral was already a challenge before the pandemic, and it remained so afterwards. According to SunLife’s Cost of Dying report 2025, the average cost of a simple funeral was £4,285, which is a rise of 134% since data collection began in 2004. It also found that a third of people said that the cost of living crisis had impacted on how they organised a funeral. Almost half said that paying for a funeral had impacted on their mental health. The funeral support service Down to Earth, which is run by Quaker Social Action, notes that a complex relationship exists between somebody’s grief and their paying for a funeral. If somebody gets into debt doing so, that debt can last for years and has a profound impact on their feelings around their bereavement. I have serious concern that people’s ability to access the funeral that they may like is financially determined.

A second way in which the grieving process was disrupted was in the most common experience of social isolation and loneliness. A significant part of the bereavement process for many is being with family and friends to support one another in grief, but 74% of adults who were bereaved during the pandemic said that they experienced social isolation and loneliness after the death of a loved one.

Thirdly, having contact with the dying person at the end of life was heavily restricted, as so many people died in hospital. Some said to the commission that knowing that their loved one was alone in hospital before they died was the hardest part of the bereavement process at the time. Those were the impacts that we saw in our work in 2022, but further work has been undertaken since then and there is more to learn.

New research published in 2023 examined the longer-term impact of grief among those who had lost loved ones during the pandemic. It found that, two years after their bereavement, 29% of people studied met the criteria for prolonged grief disorder. In particular, the social isolation and loneliness in early bereavement contributed to higher levels of prolonged grief symptoms.

According to another study on prolonged grief disorder during Covid 19, there may be a detrimental, long-term psychological outcome for those bereaved individuals regardless of the cause of death of their loved one. We do not yet fully understand all this, but there is a growing body of evidence detailing the ongoing impacts of the pandemic on bereaved people and the difference that accessible, timely and effective bereavement support can have on their bereavement symptoms. In addition, we should not forget those with long Covid who grieve the loss of who they were before they contracted the virus. It is important that we support the ongoing impacts in this area as well.

Following the recommendations of the bereavement commission, there has been much progress which we can commend. This has been and is being worked on by different Governments, including the previous Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Markham. We are glad to see the introduction in the Employment Rights Bill of a new right to bereavement leave for people who have lost a close relative. The Government are also introducing the facility for people to register a death online. The Department for Education in England has consulted on proposals to include grief education in the curriculum. On the housing front, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has an amendment to the Renters’ Rights Bill to prevent the use of ground 7 as a ground for eviction—that is, death of a tenant. This increases housing security for bereaved tenants in the private rented sector. It is very welcome.

However, there is more that can be done to support bereaved people. One of the initial recommendations from the UKCB report was for the Government to establish and deliver a cross-departmental strategy for bereavement. It is clear that bereavement and its surrounding issues are multifaceted and in need of cross-government working. A strategy could be a useful way to give this issue the attention it deserves.

The cross-governmental working group was established in 2021 and is a useful space to discuss bereavement-related issues, but there must be much more of a focus if we really are to support bereaved people. There is also the need for wider investment in bereavement services, especially for black, Asian and minority-ethnic communities and others who have been demonstrated as being poorly served. This is particularly significant given that some communities experienced much heavier loss than others during the pandemic, especially in London. If the findings I mentioned earlier prove true, this may mean that some communities are more adversely affected by symptoms of prolonged grief than others, which, of course, leads to poor mental health.

Finally, it seems that everyone, when asked, agrees that it is healthy and good for us as a society to talk about death. However, we are still poor at doing it. I am not going to talk about the substance of the assisted dying debate here, but it has prompted us as a nation to talk about death and dying, though this is still far from a normalised topic for many of us. That is reflected in our planning for and focus on bereavement, both nationally and perhaps personally.

My own experiences as a cancer nurse and as a priest mean that I have sat with people in the final hours of their lives and with people coming to terms with the loss of a loved one. To grieve is a universal experience and part of what it is to be human. My faith prompts me to believe that our feelings and relationships and the grief that comes when we lose somebody important to us are important. These experiences and emotions must be tended to. It is the role of us all, including the state, to do so.

I am grateful to your Lordships’ House for providing the time for this very important debate. Will the Minister agree to meet me and perhaps some of my key colleagues in the bereavement policy space to discuss this further? I hope that the national day of reflection will not confine our thinking on supporting bereaved people to a future crisis or as a thing of the past but that we will take this opportunity to cast a renewed focus on bereavement, because it remains everyone’s business.