Children and Bereavement

Debate between Stuart Anderson and Stella Creasy

Monday 2nd December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. It is a privilege to be part of a debate that reflects Parliament and politics at its best, which happens when we see the injustices and the suffering that have befallen those whom we represent, and we seek to make sure that they never happen again.

I start by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) for eloquently opening the debate, to Mark and John, and to the hon. Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson). Time passing does not make it easier for them; it makes it more important that we have not yet dealt with the situation that they are in. I am grateful to have heard about their experiences and to contribute to this debate with those experiences at the centre. We are speaking for thousands of people in this country, of all ages, who have lost a parent.

In my short contribution, I will raise with the Minister some examples that I have dealt with as a constituency MP. They are the cases that nobody ever wants to see. When a young child comes through our door in that position, it takes all our courage not to burst into tears when we hear their heartbreaking story, but that becomes even more of a challenge when we realise that services are not built to wrap around them. It seems so obvious that we must do everything we can for this young person, because an awful thing has happened to them, but that is not a given.

Sadly, I have dealt with several children who, as Mark lost his father, have lost their parents to murder—horrific, public murders in my local community. It seems obvious that those children would be traumatised. One child was there when it happened, but we are still struggling to get them counselling; it is not a given. The school does not have any understanding of what needs to provided. That does not mean that people at the school do not want to help, but it is so out of their worldview that that could happen, so counselling is not in place. The family have been trying to push for it for some time, but it is still a work in progress. Ironically, we have now discovered that a child can get counselling if they view a murder or are a witness, but not if it has just happened to a member of their family or to a parent.

This petition tells us about the need to recognise that children are traumatised in that way—they are traumatised by the loss of a parent whether they see it or not—so we must get counselling in. That seems so obvious, but it is not consistent. The counselling services are there, so it is a question of joining them up. I hope that the Minister can take that back to her Department.

I have also seen, for children who have lost parents to terminal illness, that counselling is not an expected part of the conversation about what we can do. It has come up only in relation to whether we can keep the child in school, but that seems too late. I would wager that the hon. Member for South Shropshire feels that, in his experience, one reason he got to that point was that nobody intervened early enough; indeed, they tried to stop the conversation rather than recognise how traumatic it would be for him. It is therefore not just about providing counselling when something horrific has happened, but about recognising how horrific it is to lose a parent at such a young age—full stop. That would make a real difference.

[Stuart Anderson]

The hon. Member makes an excellent point. Even in the Ministry of Defence, the UK armed forces have recognised that an annual MOT of mental health to discuss death, dying and bereavement, and their impact, gets a far better performance out of the soldiers who will face them. Why on earth do we not have that discussion earlier in schools too?

[Ms Creasy]

One of the reasons it is important to have counselling in schools is that, when I think about the partners who I have worked with who have lost somebody, we want to try to take as many burdens off their shoulders as possible and recognise that they are dealing with grief too. This debate focuses on children, but there is a need to join up the welfare system to support families. They have lost somebody—they have lost an income provider—and often, the time that the remaining parent wants to spend with their child is taken away because they have to work to try to make up the loss of income. We should be able to join that up.

I first became involved in many of these issues when I worked with the brilliant Widowed and Young with parents who were not married, where the impact was that families would lose an income provider who was not recognised. The children were clearly suffering, but in those cases the mums, and in one case the dad, were having to think about all the practical things, such as bills and how to keep a roof above their head. They did not have as much time to be with their children, which in itself caused grief and harm to them. We managed to get the allowance for bereaved widows extended to non-married partners, but we did not really look to challenge the idea that somehow, after 18 months, a child and a family should have recovered to the extent that there would be no impact. That affects our ability to help children.

There is another scenario I want to raise with the Minister, which addresses the first petition about data. I recently had a case that really floored me, of two children who lost their mother and then, shortly afterwards, their father—it was just extraordinary. We relied on their family members to help them, but because those family members did not have immigration status here in the UK, the children, who were British citizens, lost all their rights and were living in absolute, abject poverty. My community in Walthamstow brilliantly picked them up to try to help them while we resolved their immigration status, but the children’s rights here were gone as soon as their parents died. It got me thinking about how many other families might be in that position.

I asked the Ministry of Justice about children who have legal guardians, because that was what these family members had become for those children. It was sorting out their status that then opened up doors for the children, which took far too long—more than a year. We do not have a record of how many orphans are in this country. Think about the worst thing that could possibly happen: someone loses one parent and then the second, or maybe even loses both together. The state does not know how many of those children there are, so I asked the Ministry of Justice about the numbers of children being allocated a legal guardian because both parents had passed away. The Ministry of Justice told me, in answer to a written question, that while it thought that the information was held in court records, it was not uniformly gathered. That means the Minister’s job is doubly difficult, because she will not know how many children have no guaranteed guardian to pick any of these issues up, whether that is counselling or their financial position. It seems obvious that, as corporate parents, we ought to know how many children are in the position of sadly losing both parents.

I make a plea that we make counselling a given. It must not be something to be asked and fought for and sought out, whereby hopefully the local Member of Parliament knows about Victim Support or another charity, even though those charities do brilliant things. We must organise counselling for every child who loses a parent and do that through schools, partly to take some of the weight off the parent who is grieving. We must also start to act as corporate parents and record how many orphans there are. I hope that the number is infinitesimal, but for the two I came across in Walthamstow, I have never felt more impotent as an MP. We were trying to stop them living in horrific circumstances in which they had lost all support, funding and assistance, while we as a community were gathering together school uniforms for them and the foodbanks had to be there every single day.

I would be horrified if there were more children in that position, but since we do not know, we must do more to gather basic data to understand what is happening to some children in this country. We hope that it is a scenario we never have to deal with, but we sadly know that it is not the case. That is why it is so important that the House, as it does at its best, hears the stories and sees the reality of the messiness of human life, and acts. These petitions call on us to act on scenarios that sadly happen more than we might realise, and which we do not know the full extent of. I know the Minister shares my concern and compassion for people in that position and will want to do all she can. We must help her in lobbying her colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Justice for a better dataset of the children in that position. I know that is a view we hold across the House. Again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage for introducing the petition so eloquently.