No recourse and Funeral Support Payment

The refusal is an appealable decision but I don’t think you would get very far.

Regulation 7(8)(a) of the Social Fund Maternity and Funeral Expenses (General) Regs 2005 prescribes that the deceased partner is the responsible person for the purposes of a Funeral Payment.

The responsible person in this case has no recourse to public funds and therfore cannot claim one of the qualifying benefits

There was a human rights challenge to the qualifyiing benefits provision in Faith Stewart v SSWP (on appeal from the UT in FS v SSWP [2010] UKUT 18 (AAC))  .  That challenge failed.

For what its worth, Judge Williams held at paragraphs 70-72 of FS

70 Mr Chamberlain submitted that, in considering this, it is relevant to note that there are underlying public duties on public authorities to ensure the dignified disposal in England and Wales of any person’s corpse. Miss Munt drew attention to the duty of all local authorities to provide a funeral for the corpse of any individual that would not otherwise receive a proper cremation or burial. That duty is imposed by law under the Public Health (Control of Diseases) Act 1984, section 46. While the main purpose behind that provision is obvious from its title, that does not detract from the fact that the duty is there. (I am dealing in this decision only with the position in England and Wales, to which this Act applies). It is subject to a right of recovery of the costs from the estate of the deceased or certain other sources but that does not remove the general duty where there are no available funds.

71 I accept both from that evidence and from my own knowledge that such funerals are not now restricted to a “pauper’s burial”. I was shown a download from one local authority website. I have to say that that was one of the most welcoming sites maintained by local authorities, and the entries on the equivalent sites of some other local authorities still refer to a “pauper’s burial”, to the National Assistance Act and that they will provide burials only in extreme circumstances. But those are all presentational matters as the one statutory duty applies to all of them. I reminded Mr Chamberlain during the hearing that his submission or evidence should also have included the practice of the National Health Service to provide such a funeral to anyone who died in hospital, in an ambulance, or otherwise while in the care of the NHS if no other person accepts responsibility for a funeral.

72 The fact that FS was not given a funeral grant did not therefore prevent her late son’s body from being given a funeral, even if she did not have the means to provide it and the father did not pay or contribute. Whether on the facts the residual duty would have fallen on the local authority or the National Health Service does not matter. It would have fallen somewhere in the public domain. Failure to make provision for FS, or any other specific individual, to pay for the funeral was not therefore a failure of the state to make provision for the funeral at all. The overall position is that if surviving relatives or others will not or cannot pay for a funeral, there are two systems available to help. One is a funeral payment of the kind that the appellant wishes to claim. The other is the provision of a funeral by a public authority. This is directly relevant to any assessment of any disproportionate effect of any gaps in the extent to which the Government decides to provide the funeral payment as a way of enabling the proper disposal of the body of a deceased person

Doesn’t reg.7(10) preclude entitlement due to the NRPF status regardless of the rest?

Reg 7(10) ( which broadly concerns only those exercising EU rights of free movement ) enables a funeral payment to be made where it takes place outside the UK (see alsoe Reg 7(9))

Reg 7(10) as far as I can see has no relevance to recourse to public funds

Having said that I will resile to some extent about appealing th decision because the appeal might just might be a useful device if a parallel application was made fora variation of the leave to remain ( i.e to lift the public funds restriction following the husband’s death)