Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent estimate her Department has made of the number of people who would be eligible to receive Bereavement Support Payments each year if people who had been cohabiting before one partner died but who were not married or in a civil partnership were entitled to receive such payments.

We do not have an estimate of the total number of people who would be eligible to receive BSP each year if people who had been cohabiting before one partner died but who were not married or in a civil partnership were entitled to receive such payments.

We have published estimates of the number of bereaved cohabiting partners who would receive BSP, if eligibility were extended to cohabitees – that is, those surviving cohabiting partners who we estimate would claim BSP if they were to become eligible. This is given below and was published in January 2020 as part of an ad hoc statistical release.

Table 1: Estimated number of bereaved cohabiting partners who would receive BSP, if eligibility were extended to cohabitees

The numbers in Table 1 are rounded to the nearest 5,000.

Source: Figures taken from DWP ad hoc statistical release and can be found at found at:

Bereavement Support Payment:forecast on the effect ofextending eligibility to cohabitees, April 2020 to March 2025 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)