Social Mobility

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Holmes on securing this important and timely debate and I also very much look forward to my noble friend Lady Couttie’s maiden speech. One of the policy areas I will touch on today is the troubled families programme. Since 2008, Westminster Council, which my noble friend leads, has been helping families to restore order when they find themselves in chaos, through its family recovery team. It was an important trailblazer for this Government’s national programme. I am delighted that she will be on these Benches and I hope that she will join me in keeping the pressure on the Government, and indeed on all political parties, to develop an armamentarium of policies sufficient to tackle the epidemic of family and relationship breakdown.

Families are of fundamental importance to the whole process of social mobility, for good or for ill. When relationships between parents break down or when families cease to provide a safe, stable and nurturing environment for children and young people, it can make it far harder for them to thrive, especially when the family has other difficulties such as worklessness, serious personal debt, mental ill-health or addictions to drugs or alcohol.

Children from stable families tend to have better mental health, and preventing mental health problems from developing is incredibly important given their concerning prevalence among today’s young people. Such children also have greater access to social capital, more confidence, better-developed social networks and, therefore, more of the ingredients needed for them to experience upward social mobility.

Young people’s character and resilience have deep roots in the parenting they have received, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned; important life skills are for not only the education system to impart. Yet, in efforts to improve social mobility, it is far too easy to ignore families’ influence, focus solely on other areas such as education and work and to be overly “economistic”. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, cautioned us against this during the passage of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

Families are the neglected third pillar of the welfare state. That is why I, the Children’s Commissioner and the Centre for Social Justice keep bringing the concept of family hubs to the attention of Ministers and policymakers. Rather than letting their children’s centre stock wither on the vine, several local authorities have recognised that they need to make this infrastructure work even harder. They are integrating troubled families, early help and other budgets, including public health, in order to integrate and expand services within existing spending settlements. So help, including relationship support, is accessible for parents of children at any age through family hubs. They are somewhere to go where someone will have the answers.

The Children’s Commissioner has indeed issued a discussion paper on family hubs this month, which states:

“Family hubs would co-ordinate statutory and voluntary approaches to tackling the root causes of inter-generational poverty, family breakdown and poor outcomes for children. They have social mobility and family stability at their core”.

The Department for Education has a role to play in spreading such good practice and helping local authorities work through financially credible alternatives to simply closing children’s centres. Can my noble friend the Minister inform the House when the long-promised consultation on children’s centres will be launched?

The costs of family instability and failure are picked up by the health service, criminal justice and the courts, the benefits system, education and social care, businesses—the whole of society. This is why I have also been talking to many Ministers about the need for every government department to develop policies to strengthen families. I welcome the introduction of the Government’s family test and urge its strengthening. But this is reactive.

The test needs to be complemented in every government department by proactive policies to help create strong families, in the awareness that they are as essential to national success as employment and education. This join-up is happening locally; an important part of the rationale behind the troubled families programme was that getting truanting children back into school and long-term workless parents into employment required addressing the complex family issues holding everyone back. For example, it means integrating help and support so that specialist employment advisers work alongside family intervention key workers, and schools reinforce what these workers are seeking to achieve with families.

Could the Minster inform the House, what has been the impact of employment advisers from the troubled families programme on getting people into work? The great prize of this programme has always been its potential to drive systemic change, not just in the families whose problems are blighting their lives and draining local budgets but in how public services work. A similar systemic change in the structure of central government is also required if stronger families are to emerge and help drive much-needed improvements in social mobility.