More Government Support Needed For Bereaved Families, Says Widowed MP
MP Caroline Voaden said changing the financial support for widows and bereaved families was misguided (Alamy)
4 min read
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 meant that I could work part time, and it meant that I was there as much as I could be for my kids, who had already lost one parent,” the MP explained.
“I know there's no money, and I know everything has to be cut and we're in an awful place, but we've also got a lot of stuff going on in this country around mental health, we’ve got a lot of children in crisis, and support services are not there, social services are not there.”
Voaden added: “If we can help parents at the hardest time in their life be able to support their children by giving them a little bit of support, the ripple effects of that are huge.
“It allows that parent to to carry on working, but maybe cut their hours down, it allows them to have a little bit of balance in their life, it allows them to be there to support their kids.
New Liberal Democrat MP for South Devon, Caroline Voaden (Parliament.UK)
"I do wonder if sometimes the wider implications of these policies are thought through, because, yes, it's a cost, but probably in the long-term, it's saving money rather than costing money.”
Voaden joined the Liberal Democrats in 2016, the day after the Brexit referendum, and was elected to the European Parliament in 2019, but returned from Strasbourg the following year once the UK finally left the European Union.
She was selected for her local seat of South Devon, formerly Totnes, which had returned a Conservative MP at every election for the past 100 years.
But after the collapse of the Tory vote and with the help of tactical voting, she was one of dozens of new Liberal Democrats elected last month.
Voaden said she wanted to focus on being a good constituency MP, as well as issues like the impact of Brexit and sewage discharged into lakes and rivers, but admitted her experience of bereavement informs her politics and the sort of MP she wants to be.
“I don't think you can go through something like that and not have it influence absolutely everything about your life,” she said
“I mean, we'd only been married four years, our baby was five months old, it was just before our toddler's third birthday when Nick was diagnosed with stage four cancer, and he died a year later.
“It rocks your world. It's just, it's indescribable, really.”
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