More Government Support Needed For Bereaved Families, Says Widowed MP

A new MP who was widowed aged just 34 said the Government must do more to help bereaved families through the long-term impact of dealing with the death of a loved one.

Caroline Voaden, elected to Parliament last month for the Liberal Democrats, has first-hand experience of the long-term mental health impact on children of losing a parent, as well as the financial impact.

A former journalist for Reuters, her husband died in 2003 after contracting terminal cancer, while their two children were still infants.

Speaking to The Rundown podcast from PoliticsHome, she said former Tory chancellor Philip Hammond wrongly scrapped a system which allowed widowed parents like her to work part-time and look after her daughters.

“Nobody can understand what it's like until you've been through it, you just can’t, but one little example of policy implications is I had something called Widowed Parents Allowance, which I got because my husband had worked and paid tax and paid National Insurance for quite a long time, and was never going to get an old age pension from the state,” Voaden said.

“So therefore I was eligible for an allowance after he died, I was very lucky, which they paid until my kids left school, and the Conservative government just got rid of it.”

In 2017 the allowance was replaced by the Bereavement Support Payment, which offers a lump sum and then 18-months’ of support instead.

At the time, the government said the existing system was "overly complex and unchanged since the 1940s", and the new benefit would ensure families were helped with "acute short-term financial pressures", but Voaden said although it will cost the Treasury less in the short-term, it will have long-term implications.

“That money that I was given by the state