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If Alan dies today, his family will get around £60,000 in bereavement benefits. If he dies on Thursday, after Theresa May takes another axe to welfare, they’ll get around £6,000.

The 51-year-old husband and father of two, who has incurable cancer, reduced viewers to tears as he told his story on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme this morning.

In December, he was given between one and five months to live and was forced to give up work due to his illness.

But on Thursday, a new raft of savage cuts to bereavement benefits take effect, which could cost his family tens of thousands of pounds if he lives beyond April 5th.

He admitted he’d told his family “in some ways it wouldn’t be a bad thing to lose me a couple of days early because at least there’ll be more financial support available.”

(Image: REUTERS)

Theresa May yesterday defended the cuts as “fair.”

The cut will see families lose bereavement payments18 months after a parent has died.

Previously families would get money to support them until a child turned 18 years old.

Alan - who asked the BBC not to use his real surname to protect his family’s privacy - said: “I made a calculation not long ago regarding how much support would be available to my wife to help raise our young children. And under the current system I calculated it would have been a sum of over £50,000. And under the new system it would reduce to six.

“And I was shocked that a system of benefits that has been in place as I understand for 70 years, since 1946, although it has been renamed, the essence of this support is that when somebody is widowed, there’s financial support available for young children up to the age of 19 or 20.

“And the fact that that’s been taken away seems utterly callous and savage.”

The cruel cut has been slammed by bereaved parents including England football star Rio Ferdinand, whose wife died leaving him with young kids to bring up on his own.

But Mrs May yesterday defended the cuts, insisting 18 months of payments was actually a compromise decision.

“The new bereavement support payments... are going to replace a number of payments which were there in the past,” she said.

“The aim of the new payment is to ensure that it covers at the time when it's most crucially needed the extra costs that are experienced following bereavement.

“We have consulted on it with the Social Security Advisory Council, the select committee I think made a report on it as well – as a result of that there have been some changes, so the period will now be 18 months.

“But it's a different sort of system to ones that have been previously there in the past.”

Alan told the BBC the Government is portrayed as “caring and compassionate”, but Theresa May had decided arbitrarily that after from tomorrow, grieving only lasts for 18 months, and “after that, all is well.”

He said the prime Minister had been "naive", because the "anguish doesn't turn off like a tap" after 18 months.

Alan struggled to speak on the BBC programme, because his cancer started in his tonsils, before spreading to his lungs and chest.

He said: “I understand that this is a policy that was not at all mentioned in the Conservative manifesto, as put together by George Osborne as chancellor at the time. This policy therefore appears to have no mandate whatsoever and I can only think that some relatively junior minister advised the chancellor at the time because the amount of money that I have already built up in my state pension, through National Insurance contributions is approaching £130,000.

“So even if the existing policy was paid out, it would only represent half of the money that I have put into my state pension.

“So while this is continually referred to as a saving, actually it’s just depriving people of money that they’ve legitimately earned.”