Marriage

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I also thank the right reverend Prelate for introducing this important debate today in such a timely way. I also congratulate our maiden speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, on her speech. Clearly, as my noble friend Lord Sacks said, this is a very difficult time for many families, and it will become increasingly difficult. The noble Baroness’s expertise will be invaluable in our discussions on this matter. I was concerned to hear that there is a lack of funding for volunteers and their supervisors. I hope the Minister will take that to heart and that we will have a response on that point in correspondence or today.

I wish to concentrate on fathers and sons, but I will make a brief comment on marriage. I have not looked in detail at this issue for some years. I suppose the critics might say that one has to be careful not to confuse cause and effect with simple association. Middle-class families marry and middle-class families are more stable. Looking at the Scandinavian figures for outcomes of couple breakdown, what is interesting to see is that they have fewer breakdowns for both married and unmarried couples. What strikes me is that we must keep this in proportion. Marriage is important, but housing, education and Sure Start, combined together, are much more important. Where there is a good social infrastructure, families thrive, but even there, married couples do better than unmarried couples. This is a fairly superficial analysis, but I hope it might be helpful.

Turning briefly to Sure Start, which the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, mentioned, it would be helpful if the Minister could gather together some of the best practitioners around the country for a conference in Westminster so that local authorities could learn from best practice in children’s centres and ensure in the course of the cuts that are coming that best practice is employed by local authorities and the most effective use is made of the scant resources available.

Returning to the theme of fathers and sons, when speaking to nursery workers I have been struck in the past by their concern that sometimes when there is no father in the family the mother ends up treating her son as a little man—taking him to bed with her, for example. That is an exceptional but very real issue. Moving on to school, I spoke to a deputy head teacher yesterday with responsibility for inclusion in the school —incidentally at a meal hosted by The Place2Be, a mental health charity that works in schools. She was saying that among the issues for her boys growing up without fathers are in an increased chance of poverty, the lack of a clear male role model, and a sense that they are somewhat inferior to their peers who have fathers with whom they can do activities over the weekend. A couple of other issues also concerned her.

If we go beyond that to the care system, I can think of one boy in a children's home whose father was constantly promising to turn up for Christmas and birthdays and always letting him down; or you can visit Feltham young offender institution in the secure estate and talk to prison officers who acknowledge that many of the young men had never had the experience of a father. For them a prison officer can be a father figure.

I visited Cookham Wood young offender institution recently with colleagues. I was pleased to see the recognition that many of the young men there did not experience the joy of having a father. Some of them had experience of the Phoenix programme at this institution. They spoke very positively of this programme in which a black middle-aged man—a very solid man with great gravitas—ran a number of sessions with the young men. He spoke to them about things that their fathers might have spoken to them about such as the need to think about the consequences of their actions before acting. He introduced them to Machiavelli and talked about the fox and the lion and explained that it is sometimes better to use the fox’s way than the lion's way. He also used the technique of showering the boys with words of praise, which the boys really enjoyed. They could enjoy for a minute or two words of praise said by the group around them.

Clearly, anything that can be done to secure strong relationships between parents and enable especially boys to have the experience of an interested father in their lives has to be welcome, and I look forward to the Minister's response to the debate.