DEATH grant payments will be extended to the parents of a stillborn child, if States Members back a proposal from the Social Security Minister.
Deputy Lyndsay Feltham has lodged the Draft Social Security Law (Parental Allowance and Death Grant) amendment, which, if successful, will also mean that parents of newborn babies who require urgent hospital care will also be entitled to up to 12 weeks of additional parental allowance.
The amendment is due to be debated in the States later this month.
If approved, the changes will come into effect via Ministerial Order before the end of 2024.
The death grant is a social security benefit designed to help families with the cost of a funeral or cremation.
But the current law differentiates between the death of a child and a stillbirth for the payment of a death grant.
If approved, Deputy Feltham’s policy change would remove this distinction and extend the payment of a death grant to a parent of a stillborn child.
The amendment also address a “minor anomaly” in the treatment of civil partners to ensure that they have the same rights of married couples in respect of eligibility for a death grant.
According to the Birth and Breastfeeding Profile annual report, there is an average of two to three stillbirths per year in Jersey.
The current value of a death grant is £1,063.72, which is provided as a single payment. Therefore, this change is expected to cost the Social Security Fund less than £5,000 per year. Meanwhile, the parental allowance is a weekly contributory benefit which provides financial support to parents to allow them to take time off work to care for their new baby.
The 32-week entitlement is shared between parents, and eligibility for the benefit is based on each parent’s social security contribution record.
The weekly payment value is the same as other working-age contributory benefits – currently £265.93 per week. The new law would provide up to four weeks of additional parental allowance to parents whose baby requires urgent hospital care within the first 28 days of the baby’s life, and up to 12 weeks of additional parental allowance to parents whose baby was born prematurely and requires urgent hospital care.
The legislation would also enable those awarded extra weeks to take their parental allowance in four blocks rather than three.
“This will provide parents with more flexibility when deciding how to split and allocate their weeks of allowance,” according to the draft law.
It comes after States Members last year approved a proposition, lodged by Deputy Raluca Kovacs, which requested that the Social Security Minister bring forward proposals to provide additional financial support to parents who have a baby that requires neonatal care.
Deputy Feltham said that it was “difficult to estimate the numbers of parents who might be eligible for the extra weeks of allowance”, but estimates that “the volume of these claims will be relatively small”.
An additional spend of £300,000 from the Social Security Fund has been set aside to fund the change, but the minister suggested that “it is likely that the actual spend will be lower”.
