Love Matters (Archbishops’ Commission on Families and Households Report)

Lord Mann Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I welcome this report and I particularly welcome the Church basing a report on something from scriptures. Far be it from me to ever advise anyone in the Church on the structure of the Church, but over the years I have been baffled over how much time the Church has been deflected into issues that do not appear to feature very much in the Bible—yet here we have a report that uses a thematic, a concept, a word, that is embedded in the theology at every level, not quite in every verse but in every chapter, one might say, and I commend it on that.

I have not done any early morning revision, but I do not recall the word “divorce” featuring in the scriptures; perhaps it does and I am mistaken. I am advised that it does once. Well, there is a good balance, then, in terms of where the balance of work should be. I want to talk about separation, but a separation in terms of distance that I think is crucial to how this commendable report could assist in policy-making. Perhaps this could have been stressed more within the report, but if one compares with other faith groups—Judaism, the Muslim faith, Hindus, Sikhism—one sees strong family structures. Without question, the whole concept of faith is a key bind, but I think there is something more practical that we, as those attempting to advise and influence policy-making and decision-making by the state, could understand from the comparator, and that is to do with distance or non-distance.

What defines all those communities is that, geographically, they are rather compact. The housing that people live in is very near. That is a fundamental issue in relation to family. I have written down the term “dysfunctional families”. There is no more dysfunctional family than the one whose son’s birth will be celebrated in a week or two: a family that did not have stable housing. Availability of housing stock, it seems to me, is the single most fundamental issue in relation to family. I have been married for 37 years —I am almost beginning to lose count—and I do not fetishise the concept of marriage, but the concept of family I absolutely do, which is why I think this report is so helpful.

We live in a society where families are far less connected, and that is a significant problem. When I was a representative, for nearly 20 years, in a former coal mining community, there were many families with problems that experts could classify as dysfunctional families. They survived and often thrived, despite the problems they had, because they lived together. If I were to hope for a second report, on which the expertise in this House would be profound, including among the Bishops, it would be on the role of grandparents in society. There is an expertise in this House. I have my own modest share of it, and I am sure that there are many such experts on the Benches.

In the community I represented, grandparents were critical to the upbringing of children. Often, one did not know who was really bringing up the child. If a daughter or a son, particularly a daughter, had problems with drugs, alcohol or whatever else, which was not uncommon, in reality the children would be brought up by the neighbouring grandparents, or sometimes aunts and uncles, because the geography allowed it. How did it allow it? It allowed it because, for all sorts of historical employer-based, profit-driven reasons, I suppose, housing was built that gave a choice in housing—council housing, but also housing from the NCB, the Coal Board, which was the biggest single provider of housing from the non-local authority state. There was lots of mining housing, big family-size housing. People could get that housing. The removal of that housing stock and that choice to rent housing near family is fundamental in the destruction of society that we have seen in the last generation. We are doing nothing about it. The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, made a differentiation between well-off and poorer families. Housing is fundamental in that.

I can afford to choose to live near my grandchildren because I can purchase property there. An exception to this would be if they lived in London, in which case that would be beyond me now, and therefore beyond most people. We have allowed a distortion in the housing market—in the private market, of which London is the classic example in our country but certainly not the only city across the world like this, and in the rented sector, which we have allowed to disappear as a coherent entity. My grandparents would visit me as a child twice a week; I would visit them once a week and other family would be there. We did that every single week, without exception. That creates a strong family unit.

There are new family units—perhaps this could have been a by-line. I have many problems with the internet but one thing it has done is allow us to have a Facebook page and a WhatsApp group called “Family is Forever” which is, strangely enough, made up of family members. I am less active on the Facebook page than others. I spread family news to people who already know it—because it has been posted, and it is immediate, everyone apart from me already knows it; perhaps I am a little elderly to master these things, culturally more than technically. That has strengthened family units across distance.

I put it to those who wrote the report and to the Government that, if any Government are going to be truly pro-family, the rented housing sector has to fundamentally change, so that whether in a small rural village, a mining community or the city, people have the option to live near family. That is what is really creating the dysfunctionality. Family units and households can always be dysfunctional, and have been, and will be. But families can overcome much of that, particularly the protecting of children, if there are people available. These days, the way of work is making that significantly more difficult.

My final point has already been referenced by others, and concerns looking at those at the older end, which, by the day, I become more interested in thinking about. What does one do with elderly family? Again, how we structure housing and accommodation is absolutely fundamental. We do not make it easy, and we do not incentivise, but it is within our powers to do so. My plea to decision-makers is to take this report as a useful prompt to think through how we could make a change in housing—there will be other changes, but housing is the number one change—that would make a difference in supporting families.