My Lords, I am heartened by the healthy number of speakers for this debate—although I notice noble Lords disappearing—and appreciate very much the effort that they have made. I greatly look forward to hearing noble Lords’ contributions.
This Bill would, if passed, ensure that all proposed changes to government policy are systematically assessed for their impact on family relationships, so they are supported rather than weakened. I will explain why policy should support families and what that will require, and summarise where we are now in terms of the family test introduced three and a half years ago. While it was a welcome forerunner to what my Bill proposes, there are strong indications that it is underperforming, and my Bill would remedy that.
In my briefing to accompany this Bill I outlined its purpose as follows. Policymakers do not habitually consider, in a systematic way, if and how policies
support family relationships. It is as members of families that people usually experience the effects of policies and engage with public services. Families are impacted by policies and influence their effectiveness. Yet the focus of policy is typically on individuals. It is therefore essential to ensure that a family perspective is consistently applied to policy-making. In October 2014 the Government issued guidance for government departments on the application of the family test, which was an important first step. Departments are advised to think about family impacts in a similar way to how they consider impacts on equality to fulfil the public sector equality duty. However, equality—but not family—considerations are required by law. Moreover, departments are advised only to consider publishing assessments. The Bill would put family impact assessments and their publication on a statutory footing and require the Secretary of State to report annually on progress towards family stability targets and objectives.
I shall quickly acknowledge some of the people and organisations in this country who have consistently argued for family impact assessments: the Relationships Foundation, the Centre for Social Justice, Relate, the Family and Childcare Trust, Care and my noble friend Lady Stroud, who I am very glad to see here today. When they were in government, she and my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith ensured that the family test introduced in 2014 focused on family stability and the quality of relationships, not simply on family finances. While these are obviously very important, we in this country have a long track record of tracking household incomes and other indicators of disadvantage but we have been singularly bad at keeping our finger on the pulse of family breakdown. Indeed, the Centre for Social Justice’s 2007 Breakthrough Britain report highlighted that although the last Labour Government recognised eight domains of social exclusion, they collected data on only seven; the eighth, family breakdown, was ignored.
This Government are not doing much better. They last published the English indices of deprivation in 2015, the seven domains of which map loosely on to the former domains of social exclusion. Again, these make no reference to the breakdown of family and other relationships. The Department for Work and Pensions’ workless families strategy introduced new indicators last year. These include the proportion of children in families headed by couple parents who report relationship distress and the proportion of children in separated families who see their non-resident parents regularly. However, the social justice framework included family stability indicators: the percentage of all children not living with both their birth parents and the percentage of poorer children not living with both parents, compared to those in middle-income to higher-income households. These have completely disappeared.
In Committee on the Welfare Reform and Work Act, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, committed the Government to developing:
“a range of non-statutory indicators to measure progress against the other root causes of child poverty, which include”,
among others,
“family breakdown … Anyone will be able to assess the Government’s progress here. The Government are saying, ‘Judge us on that progress’”.—[Official Report, 9/12/15; col. 1585.]
As I have said before in this House, we cannot judge the Government on their progress against family breakdown as a root cause of child poverty when we no longer measure it but instead use the proxy of parental conflict. The DWP has given with one hand and taken with the other.
That makes no sense. We cannot ignore the importance of children being raised by both their birth parents where possible. There is the pain of losing daily contact with one of them, the blame that many children take upon themselves for the separation and the implications for financial hardship of raising children alone. One-third of children living with a working single parent live below the poverty line. Of course the quality of relationships is important but this is only half the story. Moreover, and rightly, the current family test asks questions about family stability and relationship quality.
Why should the Government support families? Well-functioning and stable families are important to all societies because of the considerable contribution that they make in, for example, generating productive workers, caring for family members and ensuring healthy child and youth development. It is always prohibitively expensive for the state to replace the functions that families perform, so Governments have both an altruistic and a vested interest in strengthening them.
When we neglect families, there are enormous fiscal and social costs. The Relationships Foundation recently published an updated headline cost of family breakdown of £51 billion. In previous years, about one-third of the overall cost was due to extra tax credits and benefits; one-third to extra health and social care costs; 15% to housing; a similar proportion to civil and criminal justice; and 5% to additional education costs. However, the sum of human misery is much harder to quantify. To take just one area, the charity Addaction found that more than half the children it was treating for serious drug and alcohol problems were from families that had split up.
The political philosophers Brighouse and Swift point out that,
“all the major political parties in the UK seek to present themselves as pro-family”.
At every general election it is “family, family, family”, but nothing significant appears to get done. All the major parties continue to allow the relentless trend of family breakdown to continue. As Professor Karen Bogenschneider observes, there is typically,
“a feast of family rhetoric but a famine of attention paid to the family concept. It remains one thing to endorse the important contributions families make to their members and society and quite another to systematically place families at the centre of policy design … and implementation”.
We need policies with the explicit end goal of supporting families, so I and colleagues published A Manifesto to Strengthen Families to counter the lack of activity that we have seen heretofore, which is generating some real anger on my party’s Benches. Around 60 MPs have signed it. We are not going to let this agenda go away.
However, Bogenschneider also refers to implicit policies that are not intended to affect families but have indirect consequences for them. The current family
test aims to lay bare those indirect consequences so they can be mitigated where necessary. However, here again the Government could be accused of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Departments are not statutorily required either to carry out the test or to publish the findings of the assessment process. The guidance only obliges policymakers to make a judgment as to whether the five questions in the test should be applied and whether the details of any assessment carried out should be published. While they must document the application of the test “in an appropriate way”, ostensibly to build an evidence base about how policies impact families, that documentation seems to be available only to other civil servants. Its operation seems to be shrouded in some secrecy. An evidence base must be accessible if sedimentary layers of knowledge are to be added to it.
A review of progress in implementing the family test one year after its launch found that only four departments could cite specific instances when the family test had been applied, while a further four did not provide a meaningful response about how or whether their department was implementing it. More promisingly, the review outlined the many steps that the DWP was taking to ensure that officials in other departments were better able to assess family impacts. These included information exchange sessions and a policy profession course on implementing the family test across Whitehall. I would be obliged if my noble friend the Minister could inform us how many of these sessions and courses have taken place over the last two years, as such training must surely need to be ongoing, given the inevitable churn of personnel.
In response to Written Questions submitted in the House of Commons in December 2017, asking the Secretary of State in 15 different departments to which legislation his department had applied the family test, more than half provided a standard and completely opaque response:
“The Government is committed to supporting families. To achieve this, in 2014 the”,
relevant department,
“introduced the Family Test, which aims to ensure that impacts on family relationships and functioning are recognised early on during the process of policy development and help inform the policy decisions made by ministers. The Family Test was not designed to be a ‘tick-box’ exercise, and as such there is no requirement for departments to publish the results of assessments made under the family test”.
Such responses characterise the family test as highly discretionary, voluntaristic and opaque in its operation. Policymakers need neither apply it, document why they have not done so, nor publish documentation when they do carry it out. Accordingly, the family test is unlikely to achieve the cultural change in policy-making that was its original intent.
Also, language matters. The phrase “family test” is unfortunate because it implies that carrying it out will produce a pass or fail judgment on a government policy instead of a careful assessment of its effects on families in the round. It might unhelpfully disincentivise publication. Hence, the Bill would make it a legal requirement for government departments to carry out and publish family impact assessments where appropriate, using similar questions to those in the existing family test
guidance. Family impact assessment is an internationally recognised concept with much good practice to learn from. The Bill would also explore the benefits of extending the requirement to local authorities and ensure that the Government act in a concerted way to address family instability by publishing family stability objectives and targets, and their proposals and policies for meeting them.
Almost half of all children are no longer living with both their parents by the time they are 15 years old. Family instability is undermining our economy, our children and young people’s mental health and our ability to tackle many of the major problems facing the Government, such as housing and social care crises. Addressing it directly is a priority, but so too is ensuring that government action is not indirectly making a bad situation worse. I beg to move.
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