Children of Alcoholics

Gareth Snell Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[George Freeman]

The hon. Lady makes another excellent point. As I know the Minister and his Department understand, not only is there no magic bullet but many of these issues circulate and form secondary complications that cost—which is the least of it—huge amounts to the health system later.

I will touch on some of the mental health issues. In our society, 80% of us are reasonably lucky, but 20% of us struggle to escape these difficult syndromes related to living with addiction or suffering from mental health. Many of our prisoners are people who are still suffering—they are prisoners, actually, of mental health and addiction—and many of our children are born to parents who have no chance of giving them a start in life. There is a circularity here that drives a lot of underlying health conditions, predispositions and comorbidities.

Without indulging my own back story too much, I want to make the point that this affliction knows no class or geographical boundaries. When I first joined the all-party group back under the coalition Government as a newly elected Conservative MP, I went with some trepidation because it was—very proudly—led by Labour MPs pointing out that poverty is a major cause of addiction and alcoholism, and they were right. The point I made was that it is a curse that goes across our society, too.

I was very lucky to have one of the most materially privileged childhoods—packed off to the greatest schools money can buy and given all the material support—but as a child in a family of two alcoholic parents, in the end it does not matter. If you are suffering that experience, you are lonely and you are on your own. I acquired at a very young age a habit of spotting which adults could see below the line. By that I mean those adults who would look at an eight-year-old, see what was going on and quietly acknowledge it, saying, “And how are you, young man? Things can’t be easy.” That is all you need as a child—to know that somebody has spotted it.

Children are very loyal. The last thing they would ever do is dob their parents in. In fact, it is quite the opposite: many children end up having to lie for their parents to get them out of difficult situations. Those are habits that no child should learn. The thing I learned above all is that there are two types of adults: those who understand—who look, who acknowledge, who see—and those who do not see below the line. That is not shaped by class or geography at all. It is the same in this House: there are some colleagues who really understand the importance of children, who do not have a voice in here unless we speak for them.

I am speaking today on behalf of all those children, wherever they are, whoever they are and whatever background they come from, to let them know that we are listening. This Parliament is here to speak for them. They may not vote, and they may feel silent or unheard, but it is not the case. Many of us here do understand and want to help them.

You probably know a child of alcohol, Mrs Harris, as do colleagues. I say that because people often say, “No, I don’t.” Well, they probably do, because there are sadly over 2.5 million children in this country who are living not with parents who drink a little bit too much—that probably applies to many of us—but with one or two parents with a serious alcohol dependency problem.

Alcohol is part of our cultural history and something that we have come to live with, accept and in many ways encourage as part of our society. However, that often means that we forget the difficult consequences for the children who live with the aftermath, whether of social drinking, binge drinking, the habits that alcoholics acquire—the habits of deceit and often forgetting what they said or did—or the unintended consequences that undermine their ability to parent and that lead to children normalising those behaviours. I am speaking for those children, wherever they are and whoever they are.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Alcohol was a very prevalent part of my childhood. I was very fortunate to have grandparents who were able to step in when it was necessary, but I will never forget. It was the fear of knowing that the pubs had just closed and that my parent would be coming home in a horrible state to disrupt what would normally be a very productive and pleasant household. Sometimes, those are the things that children take away—they are the things that I remember and cannot get away from. Those experiences also impact our relationship with alcohol, to the point that it is not something that I enjoy or particularly partake in, simply because my memories were formed by those experiences at a very young age. While I was lucky to have my grandparents, you cannot get away from those memories.

[George Freeman]

I am very grateful to the hon. Member for making a powerful, personal and political point. He is absolutely right.

For my part, people often ask me how on earth I ended up in this place. My mother, who went on to become an alcoholic—tragically, my father had been an alcoholic and she suffered terribly through that; it is her funeral on Friday—asked me after I was elected, “When did you decide that you wanted to be an MP?” I said, “Actually, mum, I came on a school trip aged 10 or 11,” as schools do; it is wonderful to see children coming in. Nobody in the class knew that I was then a solo child carer of an alcoholic parent, dealing with the things that those children do.

What struck me about the thing I was living with was the fact that there seemed to be no one I could turn to. There seemed to be no network of support, and no one I could raise it with. One was on one’s own. I walked into the Chamber of the House of Commons, in which we have the privilege to serve, and was literally electrified by what struck me: the fact that there is a place where the nation tries to take responsibility for itself, where people are elected to take responsibility and actively seek it. That, to me, was an electrifying idea.

I remember that I was the least prepossessing boy in the class. I was the smallest boy, with a mop of red hair, a very bad stammer, crushing confidence issues and a double brace. I was the least likely boy in that class to become a parliamentarian. I remember walking into the Chamber and seeing the signs saying, “Don’t touch”, “Don’t sit down”, and staring at the Dispatch Box—it was at my eye height. I remember my teacher behind the Speaker’s Chair saying, “Stop dawdling, Freeman—keep up.” I said, “I’m not dawdling, sir; I’m intrigued, because it says ‘Don’t touch’, but someone has been touching it,” as the Minister will have touched it—the sweaty corner of that Dispatch Box where nervous Ministers, being cross-examined, hold on as they are being forensically held to account, something I now realise having had the privilege of doing it.

My teacher said, “No, no, no—that is not for the public; that is where Ministers hold on when they are being cross-examined.” I was electrified by that idea, and I left the Chamber thinking, “What a place.” If we can give the children out there who are suffering some confidence that we are here for them and that we are listening, I think we will be doing them a great service, and this Parliament and our democracy too.

I want to make a point about the geography of this matter because, as with so many social malaises, we sometimes think of it as an inner-city issue. Many of the formulae that the Government use to allocate money are largely driven by the formulae shaped after the inner-city riots of the 1980s. I used to be a specialist in local government finance, for my sins, and when we look at those formulae, a lot of them allocate money to areas that have high-rise flats and high incidences of minority ethnic families—all important indicators of certain types of deprivation.

In rural areas and many areas that do not fit those qualifications, however, there are many social issues that are often hidden. In rural Mid Norfolk—an area that people drive through on the way to the most beautiful coast in the land—behind the hedges and the beautiful villages there is a tidal wave of mental illness, depression and suicide, with a farmer a week taking their life, and children suffering. We often overlook that rural dimension, and that is equally true for mental health more broadly.

That is why last year I set up the Regeneration Theatre company with my wife, to take her inspiring one-man “Hamlet” made by her ex-husband—a former alcoholic who has been to prison and has been on a journey now—around prisons to help connect with prisoners and help them understand that many of the traumas they have experienced are actually to do with addiction and the behaviours that go with it. I am grateful to the prisons Minister for his support of that.

Today is really about the children of alcohol, and I particularly want to pay tribute to NACOA, the National Association for Children of Alcoholics. Hon. Members will know that there are many all-party groups in this great Palace—although rather fewer than there used to be, which I think is probably a good thing. There were ones for jazz, teddy bears, and even I think “Brideshead Revisited” at one point. Those light, frothy, frivolous all-party groups have gone. They are now generally very serious groups, committed to issues that do not lend themselves well to individual party politics—causes that often get lost. It has been my great privilege to chair a few.

I have to say that the all-party parliamentary group on children of alcoholics is the most extraordinary I have ever seen. The meetings are packed, with 100 or 200 people. We hear from children who come to Parliament to speak about their experiences. We hear from very high-achieving adults who are still dealing with the damage of their experiences. I will mention in particular Calum Best, whose father George Best was one of the greatest footballers in the land, if not the greatest—and a Northern Irelander to boot, I believe. Funnily enough, my mother met George Best at a drying-out clinic 40 or 50 years ago. Calum is an inspiring advocate for this cause. I also want to pay tribute to Hilary, Piers, Amy, Maya and all of those who volunteer to support the children, who without them would have no voice. I will also give a shout-out to Camilla Tominey, who has been a great supporter of our work.

We have supporters in the House of Lords as well. Sometimes, I think people think that privilege comes with a disconnection from some of these ills, but people might be surprised to know how many people there are in the House of Lords who have suffered as children of addiction of all sorts. This is not an issue that lends itself to advocacy by those from just a single party or geographic area.

I welcome the Minister—it is the first time we have had the chance to engage like this—and congratulate him on his appointment as the Minister with responsibility for life sciences, a role that I was lucky enough to be the first to hold. It is great to see him in his place. Having served in his Department, I know how many difficult issues he and the Department have to deal with; there is no magic silver bullet for any of them.

Over the course of this Parliament, the all-party group will try to set out a manifesto of reasonable, deliverable, fundable, understandable and relevant reforms that we hope the Government can work with us on. We do not suggest that the Government are the only body that can deal with this; we require a culture change and a broader network of support to help the charities, the community groups and those on the ground in communities where so many children suffer in silence. I will not go through the list of issues in the manifesto, and I will save for the Minister the duty of reading out the speech that his officials have probably carefully written and gone through point by point, but may I lead a delegation from the all-party group to see him and officials in due course, once the group is formally constituted, to run through the manifesto and talk through what else we might be able to do to help these children?

I want to give the Minister the chance to respond, so I will not detain the Chamber any longer, other than to say this. Let us all keep it in our minds that there are 2.5 million children out there who are, right now, watching the bottles, watching the levels, keeping an eye on their parents, distracted from their school work, struggling to do all the things that children should, learning to normalise anxiety and learning a lot of habits that will stay with them. For some, extraordinary tenacity might serve them well, but for many it will cause them long-term problems. I think that if we can grip this issue, we will be able to do a lot for long-term public health. I am grateful to the Minister, and to you, Mrs Harris, for allowing me this debate.