Strengthening Couple Relationships

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) warmly on obtaining the debate. I am extremely grateful to the colleagues who have been here throughout this debate on a matter of important public policy. It is an area where we politicians sometimes fear to tread, thinking that it is an aspect of personal life where we should not intrude, and that we should get back to the building of bridges, bypasses, hospitals and schools. I reject that argument entirely. The issue is one of public policy that affects the amount of tax we pay, how children do in school, the criminal justice system and pretty much every area of life.

In support of my view, I quote the Prime Minister. In a great speech to Relate in June 2008 he said that

“there are some who think politics should stay out of issues like relationships…I just think that’s incredibly superficial and short-sighted”.

He continued:

“For too long, politicians here have been afraid of getting into this territory, for fear of looking old-fashioned or preachy.”

Those of us who support the thrust of his arguments are here with the full and explicit support of the Prime Minister, because he gets it. In his speech he said:

“The number one challenge we’ve got in this country today is to strengthen our society. There is no more important way of doing that than strengthening families, and there’s nothing more important to families than the strength of their relationships.”

I am delighted he said that. He continued by commenting that:

“helping people maintain strong relationships is not some fluffy alternative to reducing budget deficits—it is the way to reduce budget deficits, by reducing the demands on the state caused by family breakdown.”

In December 2010, as Prime Minister, he made another speech reiterating the important commitments he had made as Leader of the Opposition.

The parents of half the children born today will split up by the time the child is 15. By the age of 16, one in six children will not see their father at all. Cohabiting parents are sadly three times more likely than married couples to have separated by the time their child is five. A child whose parents split up is twice as likely to live in poverty as one whose parents stayed together, and has a 75% greater likelihood of underachievement at school. The Youth Justice Board says that 70% of children and young people in custody have an absent father. How much more evidence do we need that the issue is important, and a legitimate area of public policy? That is why those of us who care about it are here today. To me, it is a question of giving people the skills and support to make a success of the most important area of their lives; it is about reinforcing good habits and positive social norms.

The crisis is unfolding slowly and imperceptibly, without dramatic moments and media attention, but that is no excuse for not drawing attention to it. That is why the debate is so important, and why we look forward hugely to the Minister’s response. We want to encourage him to continue the good work begun by the Government. His boss, the Secretary of State for Education, who is charged with the matter, takes the issue seriously, too. He made an important speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research in August 2008 and considered the educational underperformance of children growing up in unstable families, citing important work by James Heckman of the university of Chicago.

We have been around the piece and we agree that we need to do something about the problem, so I want to be practical. I have five practical, positive steps that we could take. The first is to do with relationship support. There are some wonderful programmes today, and I want to give credit to them. My complaint is that often they are too small and piecemeal. I yearn to roll them out across the country so that they can be carried out to scale, to tackle the size and challenge of the problem. The first programme I want to mention is called As 2 Become 3, and is provided by Insights for Life, run by Bob and Jess Read as part of an antenatal package. That is important because dad is almost always there with mum as they go to the hospital for their antenatal courses, and the feedback about it has been tremendously good.

Let me quote what some couples said. Ali and Simone said of the course:

“The course also helped us make sure we share this 24/7 job and still find time for each other which is important as this is why the baby is here in the first place.”

Adrian and Britta, another couple, said:

“We discussed which values are most important to us, and how they could be developed and nurtured. Learning about different ways to manage conflict gave us permission to be more open and honest, and we now try to collaborate rather than merely compromising. It has been worth the extra effort as it has brought us closer.”

Many colleagues here have talked about the importance of giving people the skills and support of early intervention. Why is every single antenatal course in the country not signposting that course? Why is it not being made available in every single NHS hospital? If it is having good results and good outcomes, let us do it everywhere, not only in a few selected places.

The next course I would like to mention is Let’s Stick Together, which is run by Care for the Family. The Minister’s Department is giving funding to the Let’s Stick Together programme. Pilots are being run in different areas across the country, and we look forward to the evaluation of those. It is an hour’s course that is typically done for new parents in children’s centres. The feedback is really positive and people often want to go on and do more courses to keep their marriages and relationships strong. I celebrate that work; we should have more of it.

Another course, which is run by Family Action, is called Parents as Partners. It looks at parenting issues and encourages strong parenting, but all the academic evidence is that, as the relationship between mum and dad is strengthened, where the parents are together, the parenting outcomes are even better. I pay tribute to Family Action and the important work that it is doing.

This morning I had a briefing from Safe Families for Children, which is an excellent project to help vulnerable children. It involves early respite care for children whose parents are in deep difficulties, before the situation gets to the fostering stage. It has been run in the Chicago area very successfully, saving a lot of money there, and it has been rolled out in the north-east. I think the Minister has had an invitation from Sir Peter Vardy to go and see it, and I hope that he may be able to take that up at some point. Parents are most likely to split up just after a child has been born, so if parents can be given some space to deal with difficult issues, that can help the couple to stay together.

Last, but by no means least, I pay huge tribute to the work done by Holy Trinity Brompton, by Nicky and Sila Lee, who are the pioneers of the marriage preparation course, the marriage course, and the restored lives course, for people whose relationships have sadly split up—we must not forget such people, because we want to help them to rebuild their lives, so that they can build stronger relationships and marriages if they get the opportunity to marry again. That work is being looked at around the world. In Shanghai, they are very keen on the work of the marriage course. The Chinese Government get it in a big way and are copying in Shanghai what Nicky and Sila Lee are doing. That is the first area that I wanted to cover—practical things being done around the country. However, let us do them to scale and make sure that there is proper signposting in all those areas.

Secondly, I want those courses, and others which have not yet come to my attention but are no doubt happening, to have a kitemark—a Government seal of approval—so that public authorities such as local authorities, hospitals and others can refer people to them with confidence, knowing that proper provision is made and people’s qualifications and other standards will be acceptable. That would be hugely helpful, so that directors of public health, people running family centres, local authorities and so on could signpost such courses with confidence.

The third area I want to address, which has been mentioned by some colleagues, is local authority and local council engagement. I believe that if we value something, we measure it, and we also measure what we value. It is therefore really important that local authorities know what is going on in terms of relationship health in their areas. If local authorities saw the extent of family breakdown in their area, they would be more determined to do something about it. They have the opportunity to do so through their child poverty strategies, which need to address family breakdown. If they saw that an area was worse than another similar area, they would ask why that was and what that other area was doing better. They would perhaps want providers of some of the courses that I mentioned to come in and do something about it.

In my area, I set up the Bedfordshire Family Trust. We run couple strengthening courses. We get people coming to them and know that the courses work and that people appreciate them. That is the sort of thing that local authorities should be able to refer people to in order to save their budgets on housing, care placements and so on, because, as we know, local authorities have to watch the pennies at the moment. That is the third area where I would like to see action.

The fourth issue is public health, and that shows why family is so important. We have a Minister from the Department for Education here and I do not expect him to be an expert on health issues, but he will have heard colleagues mention health earlier. We know that there are significant implications and health costs, and that poor-quality relationships can lead to increases in alcohol consumption and cardiovascular disease, and linked problems with childhood obesity and diabetes.

As the chair of the all-party group on strengthening couple relationships, I was hugely surprised by one fact. We issued a report earlier this year called “Relationships: the missing link in public health”. Just listen to the data on coronary artery bypass grafting, which is perhaps not something that people would have thought was directly linked to the quality of relationships. The facts are that:

“The quality of couple relationships also has a remarkable impact on survival rates after bypass surgery, with married people being 2.5 times more likely to be alive 15 years after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) than those who are not married, and those in high-satisfaction marriages being 3.2 times more likely to be alive 15 years after CABG compared with those reporting low marital satisfaction”.

That is a reason to have a strong marriage, if no other.

On that fourth point, the cost to the health service of people with long-term conditions is huge. When couples are together and can support each other in older age, we save a huge amount for the health service. That is another reason why we have to take public health seriously.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve McCabe]

As a divorcé, I do not feel that my divorce has prevented me from being able to have a further solid relationship; nor has it prevented me from having a strong parental role or from being part of a family.

It is interesting that the Government’s most explicit policy to support marriage, the married couple’s tax allowance—we heard quite a lot about that from the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh)—is available only to one third of married couples. The proposals are really designed for the situation in which one partner does not work outside the home or earns very little. It is really a policy for stay-at-home mums, which is perhaps slightly at odds with some of Dr Coleman’s suggestions. Of course, it is available only for married mums, not for widows, cohabiting mums or anyone like that. Perhaps most astonishingly of all, it is available for the love rat who deserts his wife and family and runs off with someone else’s wife. He can remarry and claim the allowance. That strikes me as a slightly perverse way of strengthening couple relationships.

The other thing that is slightly strange about the policy is that it applies to only 4 million of the 12.3 million married couples, and it is not clear what impact it will have on children, given that pensioner families make up more than one third of the beneficiaries. In fact, only 35% of the 30% of families who gain from the policy have children, and only 17% have children under the age of five. It is hardly a well targeted policy if its aim is to support the concerns raised by the hon. Gentleman.

[Andrew Selous]

I want to draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the international facts. If we look across the OECD, we see that the UK is very much an exception in not recognising marriage at all in the tax system. In fact, it is really just us and Mexico alone among all the OECD countries that do not recognise it; 80% of the population of OECD countries live under a system in which marriage is recognised.

[Steve McCabe]

I was talking about the efficacy of a particular measure. Despite the doom and gloom, if we accept that not all relationships come in the form that the hon. Member for Aldershot would like to see—I accept that that is his view, and I understand that he holds it sincerely—the Relate survey to which I referred has some interesting observations. Let me pay tribute to the comments by the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) about Relate. I agree: I think that it is an excellent organisation that we should protect. The Relate survey paints a slightly rosier picture. It found that 93% of people said that, when times were hard, relationships within their family were important. Although the media sometimes presents our society as one in which family relationships have broken down, Relate could not find evidence that that was the case overall. According to its survey, families—albeit sometimes new families or reconstituted families—remain the backbone of our support systems.