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Support for the Bereaved

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Ninth Report of the Work and Pensions Committee of Session 2015-16, Support for the bereaved, HC 551, and the Government response, HC 230.

It is a pleasure to debate under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, not only because of past campaigns that we have joined in together, but because I know you can put aside partial affections and chair our debate properly, fully and impartially. The debate has been called to take note of the Work and Pensions Committee report on bereavement benefits; to give Members an opportunity, from their experiences in their constituencies, to bring the report up to date; and to invite the Minister to tell us, as I hope he will, how Government thinking has progressed. I know that this is not his brief so I, and I am sure all Members who participate in the debate, will be more than happy to have any detailed replies given to us in correspondence afterwards.

Debates such as this give me the opportunity to thank a number of people who are often not thanked. I only too willingly thank the Select Committee staff, on behalf of all the Committee members, for producing a whole series of reports that have tried to influence—and, indeed, are influencing—Government policy and beyond. I am naturally thankful that we have been able to call this debate, which gives us the opportunity to which I have referred. I stress that our Committee’s topics are all decided democratically by Committee members, so this one was not brought down from on high by the Clerks or—heaven forbid—just by me as Chairman.

Yesterday in this Chamber, we debated the nature of poverty in Merseyside. Today, we are debating how one aspect of that operates across the whole of our country. We are talking about how poverty can stab at the most vulnerable when they are at their most vulnerable. I have had examples in my constituency of families being unable to claim the ashes of a family member because they could not complete the payment of the funeral bill, and of bodies being frozen as families club together to try to get the sums that would satisfy the undertaker that a funeral could take place.

As I do, I asked Ed in my office what cases of this harrowing topic had been in this week. He reported of a constituent who lost her husband last September, having left work to care for him in the final year of his life. She had never claimed benefits until she left work, but a period of depression in her husband’s final few months led her to claim employment and support allowance. All her savings were used in those final months, and she has a mortgage to pay.

After my constituent’s husband died, she arranged for the most basic, low-cost funeral to take place. There was never any question of her thinking of having anything else or planning for anything else. She was not informed

at any point about bereavement benefits or other sources of support, such as the social fund funeral payments. Even then, she could not afford the low-cost funeral, so her daughter stepped in to pay what she could, but £1,000 is still owed on the funeral bill. The social fund payments are about £700.

It is almost a year to the day since the Select Committee published our report on bereavement benefits, so this debate is opportune not just because of the constant ticking over of similar horror stories from constituents in all of our constituencies, but because, a year on, the Government have been given a real chance to take measure of the proposals we put to them. We were concerned about bereavement benefits and the reforms the Government are making to them, of which we are supportive, as well as social fund funeral payments, which have remained at £700 since they were last reset in 2003.

Before I put questions to the Minister, which is the basis of my contribution, the latest information we have on pauper funerals—although they have been renamed local authority funerals or public health funerals, everyone locally knows they are pauper funerals—shows that on average our local authorities pay £900 to cover them, yet the Department’s grant is of £700 social fund funeral payments, linked to those 2003 prices.

I welcome the Minister and thank him for stepping in at the last moment to respond to the debate for the Government. My questions to him are as follows. One of our recommendations was that the Government should negotiate a reasonable cost for a simple funeral with funeral directors, with the social fund funeral payment reflecting the cost of that total package. We do not think it an unreasonable request for the Government to spearhead those negotiations with the industry. Therefore, what progress have they made in negotiating to get funeral directors and the funeral industry to be much more open and transparent on a decent, average or simple funeral, or whatever euphemism we wish to use for the very minimum of funerals?

Secondly, we recommended that the Department introduce an eligibility checker for social fund funeral payments so that people would quickly know how to make a claim. The Department has said that that is not a road it wishes to go down, but my constituent—the live case I cited from this week that Ed in my office is dealing with—was given no advice about what might be available from either the social fund or, as importantly, bereavement benefits, which she could have claimed in addition to her ESA payments. Has any progress at all been made in giving legs to the idea of some simple tracker mechanism, so that people can quickly see what they are eligible for?

I stress again the important point—I know I do not have to do this for the Minister or for anyone else in the Chamber—that as soon as the phone is picked up to the funeral director, the clock starts ticking on what will be charged to the family. Often, it is quite a long way down the road before they realise the expenditure to which they are already committed and whether they would have faced that expenditure had they known what help—if any—was available.

A third recommendation was to take a leaf out of the Scottish Government’s book and see what could come from the Government conducting a cross- departmental review of burials, cremations and funerals.

What information out there could we use to simplify this complicated world that families have to negotiate at a time when the vast majority of them are at their most vulnerable?

The Select Committee noted the lack of protection in the funeral market for bereaved customers, particularly for poor families in our constituencies. We heard evidence that funeral directors’ fees vary dramatically, and that many funeral directors are reluctant to display their funeral prices without it being shoehorned out of them. It is not good enough to have huge variations in the price of a basic funeral—of 200% or even 300% between providers in different areas and regions—and for there to be no way of getting that information to vulnerable families.

The Committee also made recommendations on bereavement benefits. We welcomed enormously the Government’s changes on that and thought they were absolutely the right moves. We made two recommendations in particular. The Government accepted one, which was that bereavement payments should not cease one year after the death of the person whose death triggered the eligibility, but should go on for at least 18 months. I very much welcome the Government’s decision to adopt that recommendation.

The Government said that they did not intend to make money from the reform, but that the package of reforms will save in the region of £100 million. Why is it then that they have not agreed to our second recommendation on bereavement benefits? Why have the Government not used some of those savings, which they said they never intended to make, to deliver an extension of bereavement benefits to people in similar situations to marriage, such as those in civil partnerships or who are cohabiting? That would make the benefit more broadly and, I would argue, more accurately reflect everyday life in our constituencies. People’s lives are not in old-fashioned, neat little boxes, but come differently. It is a pity that the Government have not used this once-in-a-generation reform of bereavement benefits to bring their eligibility on a par with how people live their lives today.

To conclude, I will again pile the questions on to the Minister. As I said at the beginning, given the circumstances under which he appears before us, we will be happy with written replies if the answers we want cannot be provided now. Do the Government have any plans to extend bereavement benefits to what the rest of us would call “families”, even though they do not fit the legal requirement of being married? What plans do the Government have to update the value of, and access to, social fund funeral payments? Are the Government satisfied that a pauper’s funeral—for people whose family cannot begin to bury them, who have been deserted or who have no one to bury them—now costs more than what the Government offer through social fund funeral payments? Is that acceptable, particularly when the reforms are making money?

After interviewing a range of funeral directors with the Select Committee, I do not underestimate for one moment the difficulty for the Government in trying to get agreement among funeral directors on what a simple or basic funeral could or should consist of, and what to charge for that around the country. I know that is an immensely difficult task. The Committee has powers of

compulsion to bring people together. I know that the Government do not have to use such powers, but I do not underrate the difficulty of getting the industry to meet and to be transparent about their costs and about how, sadly, a number of them rip off our most vulnerable constituents when they are least likely to have the mental energy to fight back.

My final point to the Government is that our report made a strong plea for families to be able to know very quickly whether they are eligible for the social fund funeral payment and, equally importantly, what that payment will and will not cover. In those circumstances, every family wants the very best for the loved ones they are burying or cremating, but one cautionary note ought to be made: while families will strive for the best and will club together and do all sorts of things, they ought to be clear very early on what the social fund funeral payment pays for and what it does not.

I am grateful for the opportunity to present our bereavement report; it has given me the opportunity to update the Select Committee’s thinking and present it to the House. I also welcome other hon. Members, who clearly have a passion for what is happening in their constituency, and I welcome the Minister, who will reply and say where the Government’s thinking has got to.

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