Queen’s Speech

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I start by welcoming the prominence of the issue of life chances in Her Majesty’s most gracious Speech, thus fulfilling commitments made by my noble friend Lord Freud in this House. At Second Reading of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill he described how:

“In the past, Governments spent money in an attempt to solve problems rather than drive real change in people’s lives, and our approach is different: we believe that … we must relentlessly focus on tackling the root causes of child poverty to improve the life chances of our children”.—[Official Report, 17/11/15; col. 122.]

Hence the new statutory measures on worklessness and educational attainment.

My noble friend also promised to develop indicators to measure progress against other root causes of child poverty, including family breakdown, so their inclusion in the Queen’s Speech was essential if the Prime Minister is truly to launch,

“an all-out assault on poverty”.

I need hardly say that indicators in themselves change nothing—what matters is that, to quote my noble friend Lord Freud again, they,

“drive action which will make the biggest difference to the most disadvantaged children, both now and in the future”.—[Official Report, 17/11/15; col. 32.]

Will the Ministers assure the House that bold policies commensurate with the scale of family breakdown in this country, also implicated in our high rates of mental ill-health among the young, will be brought forward?

Efforts to improve family stability could be game-changing in preventing children growing up in poverty. Joseph Rowntree Foundation research by Smith and Middleton highlights the fact that 85% of children who avoided poverty over a five-year period had lived continuously in couple households. Children in intact families are also less likely to experience behavioural problems; leave school and home earlier; become pregnant or a parent at an early age; report depressive symptoms; and smoke, abuse alcohol and use other drugs during adolescence. They are more likely to perform well in school and need less medical treatment. Family breakdown is not inevitable, and noble Lords have heard me outline solutions before such as family hubs. Noble Lords may wonder whether I will ever move on from this issue but I am compelled by the facts and the need for concerted action if we are to get ahead of this epidemic.

As well as implementing the family test, the Government need to have a Minister in every department who has the departmental responsibility for proactively addressing the causes and effects of family instability: Defra, for example, will know that relationship breakdown can undermine rural productivity when it leads to the division of family farms, loneliness and isolation, and, as we heard in Oral Questions today, even suicidality. More positively, the Ministry of Justice also knows that efforts to strengthen families are essential for the rehabilitation of offenders. The Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove, told governors this month :

“Critically, education should also help prisoners to acquire the social skills and virtues which will make them better fathers, better husbands and better brothers. Ensuring that prisoners can re-integrate into family life and maintain positive relationships is crucial to effective rehabilitation. Families are one of our most effective crime-fighting institutions. And we should strengthen them at every turn”.

A cornerstone of the justice reforms in the Queen’s Speech is the greater freedom that governors will have and the accountability for outcomes, particularly from education, that will be a key trade-off for greater control. Dame Sally Coates’s recently published review lays out a holistic vision of education for prisoners that includes family and relationship learning and practical skills for parenting, finance, and domestic management. HMP Parc in Bridgend, Wales, is a clear example, copied across the world, of a prison that has managed to change the culture around family visits without compromising on security. Similarly, HMP Winchester has transformed how prisoners engage with their families while inside. When the first week induction process includes a session that brings home to you how hard it will be for your children to have a father inside, it can lay a totally different foundation for how someone serves their sentence.

There are potentially other important knock-on effects: these prisons have found that good-quality contact with family members can make the difference between ingesting new psychoactive substances—what Prisons Minister Andrew Selous refers to as “lethal highs”—and deciding against doing so. If you know you are going to attend a homework club with your child that week or it is the day for you to write home, then even if you want to escape to drug-induced oblivion because life is so tough, these family ties can act as a strong disincentive to do so. Dads’ clubs on the wings also bolster inmates’ resolve to make good choices.

As I suggested at the outset, this new Session gives us a fresh opportunity and impetus to undertake far-reaching and much-needed social reform to strengthen our economy and enhance our security. I urge our Government to deliver a life chances strategy that rises to the scale of the challenges our society faces and Members of this House to do all we can to do likewise.