Bereavement support payment

TrinityRise8

Hi - Can anyone out there help, please? My wife has terminal cancer. We are trying to do some financial planning and decide if she should be paying any voluntary NI contributions to avoid me and our children missing out entirely on the new-style bereavement support payment and benefits. She is still nominally self-employed. She requested a summary of her National Insurance contributions - she has 13 qualifying years for pension purposes mainly, I think, through having received Child Benefit. But the National Insurance contributions summary is very clear that "Different rules apply for Bereavement Benefits". There are a number of years where she has 52 / 53 NI credits, 1 year where she is shown as having £2,244 in "NI earnings" and 3 years where she has some NICs paid at Class 1 (ranging between £27.48 and £312.88). There was a very helpful post on the Forum from last year which included a link to the new legislation in this area and explained that "in any one tax year the deceased must have paid at least 25 times the Lower Earning Limit for National Insurance" but my question is what this actually means in practice? The explanation on the government website states that "You could be eligible if your partner paid National Insurance contributions for at least 25 weeks". But does that apply to any of the types of NI contributions? We are both a long way from retirement age. Thanks!