Iain Dale's incredibly moving monologue about bereavement

23 January 2020, 20:37

Iain Dale opened up about losing family members in an incredibly moving speech after the government introduced two weeks' paid child bereavement leave for grieving parents.

Parents who suffer the tragedy of losing a child will be entitled to two weeks' statutory paid leave from work.

The new legal right, coming into force from April, is the most generous offer on parental bereavement pay and leave in the world, said ministers.

Iain said that his cousin lost her son and after watching the trauma she went through he found it difficult to know what to say.

Iain's first experience of bereavement was his grandmother when he was 17 and then his mother died in 2012; he said that while you expect the generations above to die "but you never quite think that day is going to come."

He described how supportive his workplace was and said "that ought to be what every employer does but it clearly isn't."