Family Relationships (Impact Assessment and Targets) Bill [HL]

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 23rd February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure but a rather daunting task to follow the two such erudite and knowledgeable speeches made so far on this Bill, and I congratulate the noble Baroness for bringing her wealth of knowledge and teaching to bear on it. I strongly support my noble friend’s Bill and the dedication that he has shown to this issue over many years.

I want to work backwards in the Bill and start with Clause 3, which sets targets for family stability and asks the Government to publish objectives and targets and proposals and policies to meet those targets. I assume that by targets my noble friend does not mean numerical targets—that X% or Y% of families must reach certain goals—but targets more in the sense of objectives. I want to take a step back behind the Bill and ask why it matters. What is the point of having strong and stable families? Why is it important?

I discovered many years ago in the Home Office, as Criminal Justice Minister, some fascinating statistics on how the level of criminality among young people depended on the strength of the family relationship. I am absolutely certain that that has not changed one iota over the last 20 or 30 years; we still get the same statistics and trends coming through. I choose my words very carefully here, as I do not want to be misconstrued, but it would seem that in a strong family certain factors are present, while in a weak family certain factors are lacking. A weak family is one where a single parent is trying to bring up children on his or her own. Usually, that single parent will be a woman, not through any fault of her own, but because the father has cleared off and abandoned his responsibilities. A more difficult factor is when the person is trying to bring up two or three children who, increasingly, may have different fathers, and she is struggling on her own.

The statistics also show that, if a factor is present where one or more of the parents or close relatives have been engaged in criminality, the children of that family face another uphill task to be on the straight and narrow. When there is one or more person unemployed, that is another, additional factor bearing down on a family. When the children are truanting and no one is doing anything about it, or when they are not in a loving or caring relationship, those are further negative factors.

I am not suggesting for one moment that, in any family where one or a couple of those factors are present, the children inevitably will go on to a life of criminality, but all the statistics bear out the facts that, the more of those negative factors are present, the greater the chance that the children of that family will themselves not have stable families in future, and the children themselves may go on to a life of criminality. I am making no judgment at all on the sex of the parent; that is irrelevant for these purposes. Two people bringing up children is more than twice as good as one person trying to bring up children. That is why strong and stable family relationships are important and why my noble friend’s Bill is important.

I move on to Clause 2. I am so pleased that my noble friend has suggested in the Bill that the Secretary of State must carry out an assessment before extending it to local authorities. That is the right thing to do. I am worried that we should get this right in central government first, before we extend it to local authorities. We all know that there are some excellent and brilliant local authorities out there, but there are some pretty daft ones as well—and I can imagine some of them carrying out a family impact assessment when it is quite unnecessary, wasting money and discrediting the whole thing. I can imagine, when a local authority decides to change the colour or shape of the recycling bins or boxes, it could waste months doing a family impact assessment that is not necessary.

However, in housing policy a family impact assessment is absolutely vital, as it is with planning policy. I am appalled with the number of houses that are built without gardens these days. It is bad for the environment—no food for the hedgehogs or blackbirds—but it is appalling for the children to have no play space. I have seen that around the country. So, yes, planning policy impacts families, not just whether you have bungalows for older people or enough bedrooms for children but whether you have a play space as well. So that is an area where it may be appropriate.

That brings me on to suggest that, before we extend this to local authorities, we would need a sort of checklist for them—things to think about that may impact on families. If there is just a general obligation for local authorities eventually to carry out a family impact assessment, that could damage the policy because they would be missing out in some areas and doing it improperly in others. So a sort of checklist may be helpful. Obviously, it should include education policy, social security and housing policy, as well as health policy when it is done locally. But what about care homes for the elderly? What does that have to do with families? Well, if they are separating a married couple who have been together for 50 years, that is a family. That is a grey area that needs to be thought about. So it is worth while doing an assessment and carefully thinking it out before we extend this to local authorities.

That brings me on to central government. In the briefing I read, I was surprised to see that only three departments—the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Education and the Ministry of Defence—referred to specific instances in which the family test has been applied. Noble Lords may ask what it has to do with the Ministry of Defence. There are two very important issues. First, the Ministry of Defence faces a problem at the moment with a shortage of money—it will always be short of money—and of recruitment. You cannot have an Army based on young, single men and women. We are losing married people from our Armed Forces at a rate of knots. Why are we losing them? Because the Ministry of Defence housing for our soldiers, sailors and air men and women is an absolute disgrace. It always has been and, at the moment, it looks like it always be.

In the press this morning, I read two Ministry of Defence stories—the first about the disgraceful treatment of a brave and heroic Army major who has been investigated for the seventh or eighth time for alleged offences in Iraq. It is an absolute disgrace that we have not stopped that. But the bigger story was about the number of people resigning from the Armed Forces because the accommodation in Aldershot—and Aldershot is not any worse than the rest—was so deplorable. As one woman said, “My tent in Afghanistan was better than the housing I got from the Ministry of Defence in Aldershot”. Without going further down that route, I would love to see the Ministry of Defence’s assessment of its housing and an impact assessment on families. If it could get it right for families, it would solve an awful lot of its other military problems.

Five departments said that they produced tailored guidance or tools for applying the family test, which I take to be a sort of checklist, and that brings me on to my point about a checklist for central government. If these departments have produced a checklist—which I assume will say, “If you are going to have a policy in areas X, Y and Z, apply the family test; these other areas are irrelevant and nothing to do with families, so you do not have to do the test”—that would be a very worthwhile tool and would make it more difficult for the Government to refuse my noble friend’s Bill.

I was delighted to read this morning that my right honourable friend Michael Gove is planning to put in place a deposit scheme for plastic bottles. He is going to tackle the plastic bottle scourge, and rightly so, but I hope that he would not have to do a family impact assessment on that, because it is an area that seems quite irrelevant to families, although I remember as a boy making a lot of pocket money—threepenny bits at the time—collecting glass bottles, the ones with the screw tops. I hope that Michael Gove’s scheme will allow kids to collect all these bottles and get 20 pence for them; that would really clean up the countryside.

I am being slightly facetious there, but we need to make sure that central government does not obviate its responsibilities here by saying, “The Bill is too wide-ranging; we cannot have a family test for everything—some things are irrelevant to families”. Yes, some things are irrelevant to families, but let us come up with the checklist of things that are relevant, so that government departments cannot get round them. The Bill can of course have a regulation-making power to make sure that, if a new area crops up in future, it can be added to the checklist of things that government departments must do. We could make the case that a whole range of things tangentially affect families—cycling, climate change, overseas aid—but let us concentrate on the key areas and the key departments first.

It is vital for the Department of Health, social security and the Home Office. The Home Office has apparently not done any of this, but it must do family impact assessments. With its policy on law and order, crime and policing, it is one of the key departments affecting families. I had not thought of transport until the noble Baroness mentioned it. Getting on and off buses with prams and pushchairs and so on affects families. We should find the key government departments that make the biggest impact on families and make sure that, through this legislation, they are doing family impact assessments in the areas where families are affected. Then, if we get it working in the key departments of central government, in due course it can be extended to the other departments and then to local authorities.

With those little caveats, I strongly support my noble friend’s Bill and I wish him all success. I know that the Minister will have to give the sort of generic speech that every Minister gives, probably rejecting the Bill—as we heard for the last Bill a few moments ago and as I heard for my Private Member’s Bill; there is a market for coming up with a generic ministerial rejection speech—but I hope that is not the case today. I hope I am proven wrong.