§ Mr. Stallardasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will estimate the cost of extending the proposed funeral grant to persons in receipt of the following (a) unemployment benefit, (b) attendance allowance and (c) invalidity benefit.
§ Mr. RossiPreparation of estimates providing for each benefit to be added to the list of qualifying benefits under the three separate options in the consultative document would involve disproportionate cost. It has, however, been broadly estimated that if option 1 and option 2 were extended so as to include recipients of sickness and unemployment benefit, and invalidity pension, the total benefit cost in each case would be of the order of £22 million. This allows for the fact that some beneficiaries would be in receipt of more than one qualifying benefit.
§ Mr. Stallardasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will estimate the number of people who will not be eligible to receive the new funeral grant because they are not claiming supplementary benefit to which they are entitled; and what would be the total additional expenditure necessary to pay funeral grant to those persons.
§ Mr. RossiPreparation of estimates in respect of the three different options set out in the consultative document would involve disproportionate cost. The basic problem of extending entitlement to the cases specified would be to identify at the time of bereavement that they had some unclaimed entitlement to supplementary benefit, and who were not receiving some other qualifying benefit, without imposing a new means test which our proposals are designed to avoid. There would be nothing to prevent simultaneous claims for supplementary benefit and the new funeral grant.