Last year I listened to someone talk publicly about the death of their eight-year-old son and how they, as a school dinner lady, had not been able to afford his funeral.
The pain and shame this had caused her was palpable. She told us that we were meeting on what have been her son’s 28th birthday.
You could have heard a pin drop in the room as we all digested her loss and her courage in telling her story.
Though QSA runs a project called Down to Earth, supporting hundreds of people who are bereaved from across the UK to get an affordable and meaningful funeral, this was not the story of a Down to Earth client.
This was Carolyn Harris MP, speaking in Portcullis House, as someone who was once struggling to make ends meet but who now was using her position of influence as an MP to push the government to ensure other families didn’t suffer as she did.
Her vision was for a Children’s Funeral Fund. We run a Fair Funerals campaign, and worked alongside her as she built a strong cross-party consensus on this issue.
A major breakthrough
On Easter Sunday, extraordinarily, Carolyn got her wish and Theresa May announced that the government would support a Children’s Funeral Fund. No parent who loses a child under the age of 18 will have to pay for burial or cremation fees. This means 4,350 families each year who don’t have to add this financial worry to their unimaginable grief.
This is only the latest in a string of successes for our campaign. The key focus of our work at QSA is to deliver very practical anti-poverty projects, like Down to Earth, but we strongly believe we have a role in sharing our learning where we can, and indeed, in speaking truth to power.
We run Down to Earth for people who find themselves struggling to pay for a funeral, as Carolyn was.
We run the Fair Funerals campaign because we, like Carolyn, don’t want anyone else to find themselves in that situation.