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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord German, for having secured this very important debate. About a year ago we debated at length the difficulties of children who are in distress. I give credit to the Minister for having listened and taken seriously the issues that were raised, and for having consulted widely and tried hard to come up with a solution. Of course, everybody knows that no solution will ever be perfect, but in the last year we have become better than we were a year ago. That is a tribute to all noble Lords in this House who have argued long and hard.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, have laid out very clearly how incredibly difficult it is to be bereaved. There is no formula and no straightforward way ahead. Indeed, life will never be the same again. Nothing will ever feel normal again. It is a different life, and you carry that with you always, as do the children. Of course, the children’s grief will manifest itself in all sorts of different ways. As has already been said, children who are very distressed often appear at first to behave very well, and their grief explodes at different times and in different ways, because they really do not want to cause more distress to others. I have even come across family members who have said, “How can you go out and play? Your mum’s just died”. That child is trying desperately to find something normal left in their life—and that is going out to play with other kids in the playground at school and so on, and not feeling as excluded as they usually do.

I also pay tribute briefly to the organisation The Compassionate Friends, with which many years ago I carried out a study of bereaved parents with a bereaved mum. It was published in the British Medical Journal, and we called it “Your Child is Dead”. That was how people had been told that their child was dead. It is the only paper I have ever published that was translated into French and published in a French journal. We managed to raise awareness in medicine at that time, when people were really not taking much notice of children’s needs facing bereavement.

There are of course voluntary sector bodies which now provide guidance to organisations. Employers receive guidance; ACAS has produced some very good guidance on dealing with a bereaved employee. The National Council for Palliative Care has produced a range of booklets and support materials for people supporting others in bereavement. Hopefully, the world is slightly better than it was those years ago when we actually had to flag up the fact that there were bereaved children and bereaved parents out there, and people should not run away from that.

The issue of timing is of course difficult. From having meetings with the Minister I know that the timing and the right cut-off point have been difficult to determine. I appreciate the time the Minister has given to those of us who have really wanted to bend his ear on this issue. I do not have the anxieties that some others have about the fixed time of one month. This is because I am glad that it is non-negotiable, so that whoever is bereaved does not have to justify that they need a few more days or another week. They get their block of a month, with no questions asked.

I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that the work coaches will be appropriately trained to have a light touch. They should be instructed that the first time round their request for evidence should be very, very light. Possibly the second time they can prompt someone and say, “Look, I will need something to justify this—a little bit more than you provided last time.” But it should not be punitive. The bereaved person should not have difficulty making appointments. Work coaches should know that bereaved parents should be able to jump the queue to get an appointment if they need it. They should not have to wait and go through some slow process, as others might have to.

I also hope that the voluntary sector organisations will wake up to the need to be rapidly responsive. I fear that some of them have waiting lists for bereavement support or children’s bereavement support, and they need to speed up as well. When you are distressed you cannot wait, and you need somebody to acknowledge that distress there and then and provide you with the support that you need. So it behoves those of us who work with voluntary sector organisations to be aware of this.

I declare that I work with these organisations—and there are a lot of them—which help people who are facing death and bereavement. I have also carried out work with the Childhood Bereavement Network, which provided information to the Minister. All of these organisations need to step up to the plate and become rapidly responsive, because if they do not and there is no joined-up system, people’s distress will be greater. We have to provide support within society and not have people locked away in aliquots of grief. That is a danger whenever you put down something with timeframes around it.

There have also been concerns that for a bereaved parent, getting the evidence that they need for the work coach might feel difficult and stigmatising. Again, I hope that the work coaches will be specifically instructed that they must not ask questions that the person is embarrassed to answer. They might appear to be embarrassed, but it may be that it is just too painful for them to utter what is going on—or perhaps they have not yet come to terms themselves with the behavioural difficulties and internal turmoil of the child that they are left supporting.

I also hope that the work coaches will be taught—because they may need to have it spelt out to them—that the bereaved parent may have never worked previously. They may have been a stay-at-home parent or somebody who has left work to provide care for their relative during the dying phase or because their employer was unhelpful in supporting them and they took a decision to do that. Then they suddenly feel that they have nothing left, and they have lost their job and career opportunities.

There are also those who feel forced to not carry on with their job because of problems with childcare, and because what has happened to the child has meant that they feel mistrustful of others and of strangers, so they make the choice that they have to stop working to provide support to the distressed child. The work coaches may well not have the life experiences that others have had. I hope that the Minister will be able to provide us with that reassurance.

In closing, I thank the Minister, who has shown humanity, compassion and the ability to listen. He has really tried to make the review better and to understand the difficulties for children in distress and for the bereaved parent—or the guardian who is left trying to support them, if both parents have died.