The Couples Parliament Left Out in 2023

If you lived with your partner but were not married or in a civil partnership, and the two of you had no children together, you cannot claim Bereavement Support Payment. That is the settled position, and it did not change in 2023 when the law was reformed for cohabiting parents. The reform reached unmarried couples with children and stopped there. Cohabiting couples without children were excluded from bereavement benefits before the change, and they remain excluded after it.

This catches people out, and it feels arbitrary, because the 2023 change was widely reported as a win for unmarried couples in general. It was a win, but a narrow one. The reason cohabiting couples without children were left out is not an oversight in the drafting or a gap nobody noticed. It is the direct consequence of how the court cases that forced the reform were argued and won. Each of them turned on the welfare of a child. Where there was no child, there was no successful case, and so there was no change.

This page explains how the law arrived here: the Supreme Court case that started it, the second case that carried the principle across to the current benefit, the Remedial Order that Parliament used to correct the rule, and the precise reason childless couples sit outside all of it. It also sets out what a surviving partner in that position can still claim, because one door being shut does not mean every door is.

The short answer: the reform was built entirely on children

Bereavement Support Payment is a contributory benefit. It is paid on the National Insurance record of the person who died, to their surviving husband, wife or civil partner. For a long time the rule was blunt: if you were not married and not in a civil partnership, you could not claim, whatever your circumstances and however long you had been together.

In 2023 that rule was softened, but only in one direction. A surviving partner who had been living with the deceased and who was entitled to Child Benefit for a child living with them — or who was pregnant when their partner died — was brought inside the benefit. The thing that unlocked it was the child. Take the child away and nothing was unlocked. A couple who had chosen not to marry, or had simply never got round to it, and who had no children, were left exactly where they had always been.

So the position for a childless cohabiting couple is unchanged by the reform. That is worth saying plainly, because a great deal of the coverage at the time gave the impression that unmarried couples as a group had won. They had not. The people who won were unmarried parents. We set out the everyday version of that exclusion, and how it feels to run into it, in our guide to the bereavement payment an unmarried, childless partner cannot get.

Where it started: the McLaughlin case

The change traces back to a single case brought by a woman in Northern Ireland, Siobhan McLaughlin. She had lived with her partner for many years and they had four children together, but they had never married. When he died, she was refused Widowed Parent's Allowance — the older bereavement benefit that preceded the current one — purely because the couple had not been married.

In 2018 the Supreme Court held that refusing her the allowance was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights: specifically Article 14, which prohibits discrimination, read together with Article 8, which protects family life. The court's reasoning is the whole story of why childless couples were later left out, so it is worth being precise about it. Widowed Parent's Allowance existed, the judges found, for the benefit of the children of the person who had died. The discrimination fell on the surviving parent, but the people who actually lost out were the children — and a child's need does not depend on whether their parents had signed a marriage register. It was unjustifiable, on that reasoning, to treat the children of unmarried parents worse than the children of married ones.

Notice what does the work in that judgment. It is not the length of the relationship, or the commitment of the couple, or the National Insurance the deceased had paid. It is the child. The court did not say that unmarried partners are equivalent to married ones for the purpose of bereavement benefits. It said that the children could not fairly be punished for their parents' marital status. That is a narrower principle than it first appears, and it set the boundary that childless couples would later find themselves on the wrong side of.

The second case, and the Remedial Order

The McLaughlin case was about the old benefit. By the time it was decided, Widowed Parent's Allowance had already been replaced, for deaths from April 2017 onwards, by Bereavement Support Payment. A second challenge was needed to carry the same principle across to the new benefit, and it succeeded in the High Court in 2020, which found that the exclusion of surviving cohabiting parents from Bereavement Support Payment was incompatible with the Convention on the same grounds.

Government does not have to amend a law simply because a court has declared it incompatible; a declaration of incompatibility leaves the law standing until Parliament acts. Here the correction came through a remedial order — the mechanism under the Human Rights Act 1998 for fixing a provision the courts have found to breach Convention rights. The Bereavement Benefits (Remedial) Order 2023 came into force in February 2023. It extended both the old Widowed Parent's Allowance and the current Bereavement Support Payment to surviving cohabiting partners who had a dependent child, and it reached back to the date of the 2018 Supreme Court judgment, so that families bereaved in the intervening years could make a backdated claim within a limited window.

Those backdating windows have since closed, which is a trap in its own right for anyone only now discovering the change; we cover that separately in what happened when the cohabiting backdating window shut in 2024. The point for this page is what the order did and did not do. It brought in cohabiting parents. It did not bring in cohabiting couples without children, and that was not because Parliament ran out of time or drafted carelessly.

Why childless couples were left out on purpose

It is tempting to assume the childless exclusion is a loose end that will be tidied up. It is more accurate to see it as the load-bearing logic of the whole reform.

Both court cases succeeded on a child-centred argument, and they succeeded only on that argument. Neither court ruled that excluding unmarried couples from bereavement benefits is unlawful in itself. What each ruled was that excluding the parents of children was unlawful because it harmed the children. When the government drafted the remedial order, it followed that reasoning to the letter. It extended the benefit exactly as far as the judgments required and no further, tying eligibility to a Child Benefit entitlement or a pregnancy at the date of death. A childless couple fell outside because the legal case that would have brought them inside had never been made, let alone won.

The exclusion did not pass unnoticed. It was raised while the order was going through Parliament, and the government's answer was, in effect, that the reform was a response to specific court rulings about children and was deliberately confined to them. So the position is not an accident waiting to be corrected. It is a choice, made openly, resting on the shape of the litigation.

One further point closes off a hope people sometimes cling to. It does not matter how the death happened. There is a narrow route by which a death caused by an accident at work or an industrial disease can satisfy the contribution side of the test even where the usual National Insurance record falls short, which we explain in how the contribution condition is waived for a death caused by work. But that concession is about contributions, not about the relationship. It cannot help a childless cohabiting partner, because the barrier they hit is not the deceased's contribution record — it is the requirement to have been married, in a civil partnership, or a parent.

If you did have a child, the line is not always where you expect

Because the whole thing hinges on a child, it is worth being careful about what counts, since some couples who assume they are excluded are not, and some who assume they qualify do not.

The test is not simply whether you had children at some point. It is whether, at the date of death, you were entitled to Child Benefit for a child, or were pregnant. A couple whose children have grown up and left Child Benefit behind are, for this purpose, in the same position as a couple who never had children. Conversely, a surviving partner who was raising a child from a previous relationship, or a child who was not biologically the deceased's, may still qualify if the Child Benefit entitlement was there — the benefit follows responsibility for a child, not the child's parentage. Those blended-family situations are their own tangle, and we work through them in how the rules treat cohabiting couples with children from a previous relationship.

If you are reading this and you did have a dependent child living with you when your partner died, do not assume this exclusion applies to you. Check your Child Benefit position at the date of death first. The rest of this page is written for the couple the reform genuinely left out: no marriage, no civil partnership, and no child.

What a childless surviving partner can claim instead

Being outside Bereavement Support Payment does not leave you with nothing, but it does mean the state's tailored bereavement money is not available to you, and the things that remain are either means-tested or depend on what your partner had arranged privately. It is worth working through them methodically, because several are easy to miss in the first weeks.

• Death in service and workplace schemes. Many employers pay a lump sum if an employee dies while working for them, and these schemes usually pay whoever the employee nominated rather than following the marriage rules. A nominated unmarried partner can be paid in full. If your partner was employed, ask the employer whether such cover existed and who was nominated. Be aware that a lump sum landing in your account can interact with any benefits you claim, which we cover in how a death in service payment affects Universal Credit.
• Pension death benefits. Workplace and personal pensions often pay a survivor's pension or a lump sum, and scheme trustees frequently have discretion to pay an unmarried partner — especially where a nomination form named you. Ask each pension provider directly; do not assume that not being married rules you out.
• Means-tested support. Universal Credit or, if you are over the qualifying age, Pension Credit may be available depending on your income and savings, and both can open the door to further help. Your council tax may also fall now you are the only adult in the home, which is a small but real saving explained in the single person discount that nobody tells the council about.
• Help with the funeral. A Funeral Expenses Payment towards the cost of a funeral may be available if you receive a qualifying means-tested benefit. It is a separate claim with its own deadline, and it is not the same thing as Bereavement Support Payment.

You can check your eligibility for the state benefit itself on the official Bereavement Support Payment page, and free, independent help with the wider picture is available from MoneyHelper, which is government-backed and will not sell you anything.

There is a harder truth underneath all of this. For a childless cohabiting couple, the state has decided that the survivor is not its responsibility in the way a spouse is. That is precisely the gap private life cover exists to close, and it is the one situation where being unmarried makes the case for it stronger rather than weaker, because there is no bereavement benefit sitting behind you. A policy can be written in trust so that it pays your partner directly and outside your estate, in the same way people arrange cover for a family they are not married into — the mechanism is set out in our guide to paying the people you choose without the money passing through your estate. If you want to understand what that would involve, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker price cover against your own circumstances.

Will the exclusion ever change?

There is no honest way to promise that it will. At the time of writing there is no government commitment to extend bereavement benefits to childless cohabiting couples, and the 2023 order itself contains no route towards one. Any change would require new primary or secondary legislation, driven either by fresh political will or by a fresh and successful legal challenge.

The arguments campaigners make are not weak ones. Cohabiting couples are, on the Office for National Statistics' own account, the fastest-growing family type in the UK, so the number of people affected is not marginal and is rising. The deceased partner paid National Insurance like everyone else, and it is their record the benefit is built on, which makes the marriage requirement feel less like a contribution test and more like a moral one. But those are arguments for changing the law, not descriptions of what it currently is. Unless and until the law is changed, the position stands: no marriage or civil partnership, and no child, means no Bereavement Support Payment.

Source: Office for National Statistics, Families and households in the UK, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Bereavement Support Payment is a reserved benefit, so the eligibility rules — including the marriage-or-children requirement — are the same in Scotland as in England and Wales, administered by the Department for Work and Pensions across Great Britain. What is devolved in Scotland is help with funeral costs, which runs as a separate Scottish scheme with its own rules rather than the Great Britain funeral payment.

Northern Ireland legislates for its own social security, through the Department for Communities, but the bereavement rules mirror those in Great Britain, and the childless exclusion is the same there too. There is a particular irony in that, because the case that started the whole reform came from Northern Ireland. The principle Siobhan McLaughlin established reached across the United Kingdom, but it reached only as far as its own logic allowed — to parents, and no further. For the full map of what the state does and does not pay after a death, our guide to bereavement benefits and state support pulls the pieces together.

Frequently asked questions

Why were childless cohabiting couples left out?

Because the court rulings that forced the change were about children. The Supreme Court found the exclusion of cohabiting parents unjustified specifically because the benefit was aimed at children's welfare, and the second case applied that same reasoning to the current payment. The 2023 Remedial Order followed the judgments exactly, extending the benefit to surviving parents and no further. Couples without children were left outside deliberately, because no successful case had ever been made for them.

Is that likely to change?

There is no current commitment to extend it. Campaigners point to the sheer number of cohabiting couples in the UK and to the National Insurance the deceased partner paid, but any extension would need new legislation, and nothing in the 2023 order itself provides a way in. It could change through a future policy decision or a further legal challenge, but as the law stands today a childless cohabiting survivor cannot claim.

What can a childless cohabiting partner do now?

Check any workplace death in service benefit and pension nomination first, because those schemes often pay a nominated partner regardless of marriage. Look at means-tested support such as Universal Credit or Pension Credit, and at help with council tax now you are the only adult in the household. A Funeral Expenses Payment may be available if you receive a qualifying benefit. Where your own future security depends on it, private life cover is the one reliable way to replace the safety net the state does not provide here.