Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. This is something like the fifth debate on this subject that I have taken part in since I became an MP in 2017, and it is more than two years since I asked the then Leader of the House whether we could have a debate on it. During those two and a half years, I have repeatedly asked the Government to look at a register for bereaved children, because it was suggested to me by Winston’s Wish.
I first thought about and became aware of this issue in a conversation with my sister over lunch. My sister, who is now 50, said to me, “Do you remember how when dad died”—when she was eight—“we never really saw anybody from social services? Nobody came to see us and nothing happened.” I said, “Yeah, that’s right, because we had never been in contact with social services. They didn’t think we needed them. Do you know it’s still the same?” I think a friend’s partner had died and I realised that nothing had changed in 40 years, and I thought that was ridiculous.
I spoke to staff at Winston’s Wish and they said, “Yeah, the problem is that we know how many children are bereaved every year. We know they are out there and we have the support networks to help them. We have the facilities. We have peers they can talk to who will appreciate it”—as the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) said—“but the charities and organisations do not know how to get in touch with the children because it is not recorded where they are.” The families do not know how to get in touch with the support networks because, when they go to record a death, no one asks, “Do you need help for a child?” It should be simple. That is why I think that a record, as the petition calls for, is the best way forward.
To turn briefly to other subjects, it is vital to teach about bereavement and loss in school—that is the role that schools have played—but, with respect to Members from the previous Government, they seemed to think that only schools should have responsibility. I do not think that is what children or their parents want. Children who have lost a parent, a grandparent, a friend’s parent or a sibling need help at times when the school is not available—at night, when they are lonely or upset, or when they are a teenager and do not know who to turn to for advice. That is when they need their peers. Often, they do not want to talk to the school, or they might move school and not know many people.
The idea is to have a register, a simple box-ticking exercise to say, when a death is recorded, that there is a child who may be affected, with paperwork handed out —the leaflets, the contacts—and that would not mean letting that data be public. There would never have to be any publication of the data; it would simply be putting people who need the help in touch with the people who can offer that help. If we do not do that, we face the situation that the hon. Member for Stevenage talked about: adults who went through a traumatic experience as a child never getting the help they need to get over it fully, so that it comes back when they are adults. That can get them involved in crime or drugs, or give them difficulty forming personal relationships.
When I spoke to one of the charities involved with adults bereaved as children, one of its psychologists said to me, “You do realise you could be opening a whole can of worms for yourself. You might not have dealt with this quite as well as you thought you did.” I think she is wrong, but we never know—it does come back in later life. It can contribute to the burden on the NHS or problems in the economy. If we will not look only at the huge moral and compassionate case for having this register, we should look at the economic one and see that that backs up the moral and compassionate case.
I thank the hon. Member for Stevenage for how he introduced both petitions, and I say to the Government: please, before my private Member’s Bill comes before the House in July, may we come up with a way of saving so many children in this country going through any more long-term pain? The help is there for them—charities such as Winston’s Wish want to help them, but they just do not know where those children are.