Welfare: Cost of Family Breakdown

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Freud

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

There was a very substantial long-term jump in the number of cohabiting relationships. It went up over the last Government from more than 600,000 to 1.1 million. It is somewhat flattening now; it currently stands at 1.2 million. The noble Baroness is right in that the actual figure is that those couples are four times more likely to split when their child is under three than if they are married. However, there are some structural and major societal changes behind those trends, and it will take an enormous amount of effort to start putting marriage back into its rightful place. That is exactly one of the things that we are looking to do with the family stability review.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister have a breakdown of the amount of funding that the Government give to those charities that help families in difficulty to prevent the partnership breaking down? Can he say whether there is a role for the Family Nurse Partnership in helping families stay together?

[Lord Freud]

We are running two immediate programmes. The first is to provide help and support for separated families, running in SR10 at £14 million, £10 million of which is spent on an innovation fund that tests various interventions, involving 17 different voluntary and private groups. The other aspect is the relationship support interventions, on which we are spending £30 million. There are three main areas—something called Let’s Stick Together, marriage preparation and couples counselling.

Child Poverty

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Freud

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, that is a complicated question. As noble Lords know, fundamentally, child poverty has been stuck at the same level since around 2004-05. We have seen a statistically significant reduction this year, but it is very much the same figure as it was five years ago. The IFS, as the noble Baroness pointed out, predicts an increase of 200,000 in the number of children in poverty in two or three years’ time. That may or may not be true, but our fundamental reforms, particularly of the universal credit, will start to drive that figure down. We are predicting, as has already been announced, 350,000 fewer children in poverty as a result of the universal credit when it is introduced and 300,000 fewer workless families.

[Baroness Walmsley]

Does the Minister agree that the nutrition of children in poverty is a very important element? Now that the School Food Trust is a charity and has moved out of the department as an agency of government, do the Government intend to ensure that it has the wherewithal to do the research into the nutrition of children in poverty that is necessary to inform government policy?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we have made quite a substantial change in approach to tackling child poverty. With our proposal to change the Child Poverty Commission into the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, which went into Committee in the other place today, we are reinforcing some other measures beyond just income changes. We are using a series of other indicators to look at life chances as well as poverty in order to make sure that children have a better start and greater well-being.