Widowed Parent’s Allowance — House of Commons, 2018-09-05
Topic: Social Welfare
Margaret Greenwood (Labour, Centre-left): Last week the Supreme Court ruled that the denial of widowed parent’s allowance to surviving unmarried partners with children is incompatible with the law, in upholding the appeal of Siobhan McLaughlin, who lived with her partner, John Adams, and their four children for 23 years until John died in January 2014. I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, and I pay tribute to Siobhan McLaughlin and her family for their courage in pursuing this important case. Unmarried bereaved parents should not be subject to discrimination because of their marital status; to put it simply, their children’s needs are the same. The Supreme Court said: "The financial loss caused to families with children by the death of a parent...is the same whether or not the parents are married or in a civil partnership." The financial support provided by the state can be vital to a family who are already grieving for their loss and who may also be facing financial hardship because of diminished income The judgment relates to legislation in Northern Ireland, but unmarried couples are ineligible for widowed parent’s allowance in the rest of the UK as well, so the principle established by the Supreme Court has wider implications. Bereaved parents are already contacting support organisations, such as the Childhood Bereavement Network, to ask for guidance in the light of the judgment The Minister said that the Government are considering the Court’s judgment and how the Department should proceed, but this judgment did not come out of the blue. In March 2016, the Work and Pensions Committee warned the Government that they could be forced to change their policy as a result of this specific case. The Select Committee’s "Support for the bereaved" report, published in March 2016, clearly expressed the view that excluding unmarried couples was wrong. It said: "Penalising children on the grounds of the marital status of their parents is unjust." So what assessment has the Department made of the cost of bringing the legislation on eligibility for widowed parent’s allowance into line with the Supreme Court judgment in the whole of the UK? What assessment has the Department made of the number of families who made a claim for widowed parent’s allowance that was denied because the parents were not married The Minister said that restricting eligibility to those in a legal union has been a consistent feature of bereavement support in order to protect and clarify the entitlement. However, although unmarried couples were treated differently when it came to making a claim for widowed parent’s allowance, that does not apply when it comes to the Department ending their claim, because if the surviving partner cohabits with a new partner their claim is ended, just as it would be if they remarried or entered a civil partnership. The Minister said that it was for Parliament to change the law, and he referred to the vote in 2014. That led to the Government introducing the bereavement support payment in April 2017 to replace widowed parent’s allowance and two other bereavement benefits. Yet they decided to continue to exclude unmarried couples, even though both Members in this place and voluntary organisations working in the field called for eligibility to be extended to them. The Department for Work and Pensions itself estimated that 75% of bereaved families with children would receive less support under the new system The Government claimed that they were motivated not by the desire to save money but by the need to "modernise" financial support for bereaved families in order to better reflect society. According to the Office for National Statistics, cohabiting couples are the second largest family type and the fastest growing. The number of cohabiting couples has more than doubled, from 1.5 million in 1996 to 3.3 million in 2017, and the percentage of dependent children living in cohabiting couple families increased from 7% in 1996 to 15% by 2017. When the Government introduced the bereavement support payment to "modernise" support, why did they not extend eligibility to unmarried couples? What message does that send to those children about how they are valued by this Government Will the Government now act to bring bereavement support payment into line with the principle established by the Supreme Court that bereaved children should not be disadvantaged because of their parents’ marital status? The purpose of financial support by the state for bereaved families is to try to ensure that, as far as possible, families struggling with grief at the loss of a parent or partner should not have to face the additional worry of how they will manage financially. That should surely apply to families regardless of whether the parents were married or not, as the Supreme Court said last week.