Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to identify bereaved children in official statistics for the purposes of meeting their needs.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the letter attached from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Rt Rev. the Lord Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

01 June 2023

Dear Lord Bishop,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what plans there are to identify bereaved children in official statistics for the purposes of meeting their needs (HL8022).

Deaths are registered in England and Wales as part of civil registration, a legal requirement. A death registration does not include details of the deceased’s family relationships and as such cannot be used to identify bereaved children.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has no current plans to identify bereaved children in official statistics. However, as part of the forthcoming consultation on population statistics we will consider it as part of our future plans across population statistics. This consultation will officially launch at the end of the month and more details will be available on our website.

You may be interested in our previous published estimates that used the ONS Longitudinal Study (LS) to estimate the proportion of children born between the years 1971-2000, and followed up to the end of 2016, who experienced the death of their mother. Around 1% of children are likely to experience the death of their mother before they reach the age of 16. This equated to around 7,000 children every year in England and Wales who could experience maternal bereavement by the age of 16.

An estimate for those experiencing the death of their father or other relationships was not possible to create using the same methodology.

The data are an estimate within a range and are limited to children born in England and Wales. Stepchildren and adopted children are not captured using this method.

The estimate is described in more detail in ‘How many children experience the death of their mother?’ [1] and the data can be found in our ‘Children aged under 16 years who have experienced the death of their mother’ release [2].

Yours sincerely,

Professor Sir Ian Diamond

[1] https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2019/02/22/how-many-children-experience-the-death-of-their-mother/

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/childrenwhoareunder16wholoseamother