Queen’s Speech

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating my noble friend Lord O’Neill of Gatley and the noble Lord, Lord King of Lothbury, on their excellent maiden speeches. I welcome particularly the strengthened contribution which my noble friend brings to the Front-Bench Treasury team and which both noble Lords will bring to future economic debates in this House.

My noble friend Lord O’Neill underlined in his speech the need for improved productivity, as we have heard much of today, if our economy is to prosper. In this respect, I would like to contribute to this debate from the somewhat unusual angle of government family policy. I was delighted by the emphasis in Her Majesty’s gracious Speech on giving every child the best start in life. The Prime Minister made this a cornerstone of our election campaign, reiterating what he has always maintained: that the best start begins with a strong family. It is completely appropriate that a debate on the economy includes an emphasis on strong families, because they are the absolute bedrock of a successful nation. Sound management of the economy requires investment to ensure that families are productive and able to add value, instead of costing money. Helping families to get relationships right creates wealth, while failed relationships dissipate it.

With this in mind, I want to talk about the need to counter the biggest and most downplayed assault on our social fabric: family breakdown. As my honourable friend Fiona Bruce said this week in the other place:

“States have a vested interest in making families stronger. They make a contribution to society by producing a competitive labour force, caring for family members … playing an instrumental role in healthy child and youth development and putting a heart into local communities”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/6/15; col. 531.]


Yet one-third of all children have experienced the breakdown of their parents’ relationships. That is nearly 5 million children and in percentage terms twice the OECD average and over six times as high as it is in Finland. Costing nearly £50 billion a year, it really is the elephant in the room when discussing the wider economy.

Much is made of the costs of families with complex needs, estimated to be £9 billion per year, to justify the troubled families programme. Help to turn their lives around is essential, but the tax credits and benefits bill associated with family splits across the country is almost £14 billion, with housing costs of £5 billion and health and social care costs of £16 billion. Much of this net loss to the Exchequer could be turned into tax receipts if families could be stabilised and helped to become net contributors to the economy. So as we embark on the first 100 days of a majority Conservative Government who are relentlessly focused on getting our economy on a sound footing, we must develop family policy that goes way beyond childcare and parental leave.

Making progress on this agenda will require a Cabinet-level family champion. Just as with the equalities brief, we cannot leave this to impact assessments, welcome though the new family test for all policy is. We need a Secretary of State with clear accountability, and resource at a departmental level, to prioritise the stability as well as quality of relationships and to promote fatherhood. Every government department has a role to play. For example, the Ministry of Justice should prioritise parenting and relationship support in prisons to reduce reoffending. The National Audit Office estimates that this costs between £9.5 billion and £13 billion every year—the same amount as the London Olympics. Yet reoffending rates are significantly reduced when a prisoner returns to a stable family environment.

The Department for Work and Pensions must address family breakdown as a driver of welfare dependency through its ownership of the wider social justice agenda. Communities and Local Government must ensure that couple work is included in the troubled families programme, and local authorities should address family breakdown as a root cause of poverty in local child poverty strategies.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs should also acknowledge the strain on farming families and couples from the challenges of the rural economy, where depression and suicide are higher. Business, Innovation and Skills Ministers should work with employers to provide relationship support to reduce absenteeism. Lloyds Bank and others already do webinars on couple relationships as well as parenting.

Finally, the Department for Education and the Department of Health should work jointly on children’s and young people’s mental health. Family conflict and breakdown contribute significantly to the onset of mental health problems, so not least because of the huge associated costs this should be a priority area. But it is not. Friedli and Parsonage have calculated the lifetime cost of childhood mental disorder very conservatively at £150,000 per case, so just one year’s cohort of children with conduct disorder is costing us £5.25 billion.

As well as better mental health provision integrated into schools and other settings, we specifically need community-based infrastructure, such as children’s centres, to be far more responsive to the problems besetting many families. I have described in the past how they should become family hubs where anyone can go with a family or relationship issue.

To remove all doubt about this issue, people do seek help for their relationship anxieties. Just this week, Citizens Advice revealed that personal relationship issues in particular are putting enormous strains and pressure on GPs, who spend almost a fifth of their consultation time, and almost £400 million, on non-medical matters. GPs have nowhere to send people, hence broadening children’s centres into family hubs could ease significant pressures on our health service and help to contribute to the £22 billion of savings the NHS has to find.

Family relationships are not the soft centre of social policy but are at the hard edges where costs multiply. Strengthening families puts backbone into our nation and is indispensable to the sound management of our economy.