Early Years Intervention

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for bringing this extremely important subject to our attention by securing this debate.

Children in the earliest years of life are so vulnerable and so dependent on their parents that our focus has to be on strengthening families. Giving a child the best possible chance to avoid succumbing to an intergenerational cycle of disadvantage very often gives both the mother and the father a vital second chance to turn their lives around. They are frequently the product of a broken, fatherless or dysfunctional family themselves.

Too often, fathers are unjustifiably ruled out of the picture and considered to be surplus to requirement, yet they can make a significant contribution to children’s development of identity and self-esteem and can bring vital material and less tangible resources into the family. When fathers play with, read to, and help care for their children, the children have fewer behavioural problems, both in the early school years and in adolescence, and have higher IQs at age three than children from otherwise similar social backgrounds whose fathers are not involved. The public understands this: a recent YouGov poll found that 95% of adults believe that fathers are important to a child’s well-being. Yet around a million children today have no meaningful contact with their fathers.

The section in the Welfare Reform Act 2009 which made fathers’ inclusion on birth certificates compulsory unless grounds for exemption were met was never brought into force, but I urge the Government to do so. If fathers fail to register on the birth certificate, that predicts less involvement and low or non-payment of child maintenance.

Early years provision, particularly based in Sure Start children’s centres, has a vital role to play by drawing in fathers. Sure Start has evolved greatly from its beginnings, but it needs to keep on doing so. Various organisations such as the Centre for Social Justice, 4Children and others are pressing all the political parties to make the development of family hubs, particularly out of existing children’s centres, a manifesto promise. What would those family hubs do? They would be local “nerve centres”, co-ordinating all family-related support, including universal and specialist services, to help both parents.

Given the very high levels of family breakdown in this country, Sure Start family hubs would include couple relationship support and education as part of their core offer to families before, during and after separation. Local health commissioners would ensure that all ante and post-natal services are co-located within or co-ordinated from family hubs. Father engagement would be part of family hubs’ reformed core purpose and would be included in Ofsted and Care Quality Commission inspections and local authorities’ payment by results frameworks. All birth registrations would take place within family hubs; if new parents were able to register births in these family-focused settings they would see from the outset the help that is available.

Concerns about the prevalence of domestic abuse are often raised to argue against making efforts to involve fathers. Children’s safety is obviously of paramount concern, so we urgently need more effective projects which work with male perpetrators of domestic abuse where they are genuinely desperate to change. I am not minimising perpetrators’ responsibility for harm inflicted, but we have to recognise that, even if they are absent, fathers still exist in the mind of the child and can influence little ones’ behaviour, self-worth and sense of identity.

I support the right reverend Prelate’s enthusiasm for “Healthy Relationships: Healthy Baby”, a project supported by the Stefanou Foundation. In the pilots in Westminster and Stevenage, both parents receive the therapeutic help they need, whether they are the abuser or the abused, to stop perpetrating and overcome the impact of abuse and to address difficulties arising from their own childhoods. Crucially, and with safety as the overriding consideration, they are helped to co-parent the baby and other children, even if they decide not to remain together as a couple. Getting to the roots of why parents are unable to provide the consistent love upon which their children’s well-being is so dependent has to be prioritised.

We are, as a society, never going to reverse the tide of family breakdown and dysfunction that tends to affect children’s life chances so gravely unless we help parents address the drivers of their own disadvantage. This requires difficult and careful work that draws in expertise and funding from the public, private and social sectors, but also community goodwill. Behind very many grass-roots organisations is a well of resource and friendship based, perhaps, in a local church or other faith community. This is a classic area in which the welfare society has to stand four-square alongside the welfare state.