Since UK scuba diver Steve Clowes went missing off the Dorset coast two years ago, Divernet has followed the unforeseen difficulties experienced by his widow Vivien.
Ascending from a dive on the 56m-deep wreck of the Aracan with a close friend, 57-year-old Steve had secured his reel for a 15m safety stop – but then failed to surface.
An experienced Master Scuba Instructor with more than 25 years’ of teaching experience, he had spent many years exploring Portland wrecks, and to that point it had been a fairly routine dive for the pair. A major search and rescue operation was stood down the following day (26 May, 2024) but Steve’s body was never found.
“The pain hasn’t receded – it’s still as raw now as it was when I lost Steve,” says Vivien. She had been a Master Scuba Diver herself, but had stopped diving in 2010 while raising the couple’s five children.
Last year she launched an appeal for better deep-search equipment for the RNLI, though it unfortunately fell short of its goal. Now she is fighting to support a petition raised by the campaign group Widow’s Fight UK to help families facing the sort of problems she has experienced since Steve’s death – and hopes the UK diving community will help by adding their signatures.
Death certificate
Her first challenge had been to secure the Presumption of Death Order required for a person like Steve who has vanished without trace. Without it, she would have been unable to settle his estate and would have risked losing their home, but the bureaucracy had proved frustrating and the process drawn out, as described previously on Divernet.
After eventually gaining the required death certificate, Vivien had faced another devastating blow. She and Steve had married as teenagers in 1985, and he had become a senior electrical engineer and paid National Insurance (NI) contributions for almost 40 years.
As a subcontractor in the early years, however, during periods in which work had been scarce, rather than claim unemployment benefit he had carried on independently, leaving gaps in his NI record.
Shortly before Steve’s death “we topped up those missing years, believing we were protecting our future together,” says Vivien. “The heartbreaking reality is that the bereavement support I received did not even cover the amount we topped to fill those gaps.
“What I believed would be a widow’s pension was, in reality, just 18 months of Bereavement Support Payment [BSP]. After that, the support ends.
“No amount of money can ease the grief of losing the person you love most, but the financial reality of widowhood adds another layer of fear, stress and uncertainty at the worst possible time.”
“When Steve died, our household income dropped by around 70%. Life insurance allowed me to pay off the mortgage, but life does not stop. The bills do not stop. Grief does not pause the cost of living. I am now raising and supporting our teenage sons on a single income while trying to navigate unimaginable loss.”
‘Morally indefensible’
The short-term Bereavement Support Payment, introduced by the 2010-15 Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition government, can condemn widowed families to financial hardship for years, according to Vivien, whereas she says that the Widowed Parent’s Allowance it replaced had offered some stability because it lasted until Child Benefit ended.
The national campaign Vivien wants UK divers to support aims to reform the “morally indefensible” BSP, which Widow’s Fight UK says is failing thousands of grieving families.
The group has completed a report based on what it describes as “a powerful body of evidence” drawn from the experiences of widows and widowers across the UK, combined with more from the Child Bereavement Network and Marie Curie.
The petition remains open until 8 July and has so far attracted more than 38,000 signatures – but time is running out, because it requires 100,000 to be considered for Parliamentary debate.
“The current support system does not reflect the reality families face after losing a spouse,” says Vivien. “It does not reflect decades of NI contributions, long marriages or the devastating financial impact of suddenly losing a partner’s income.
“The support for widows – and widowers – needs to change. Because behind every statistic is a family like mine, doing their best to survive while carrying a loss that never leaves them.”
