Budget Statement

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 4th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, many of your Lordships kindly gave time on 2 November to speak in the take-note debate on A Manifesto to Strengthen Families. Signed by over 55 honourable Conservative Members from the other place, the aim was to make it crystal clear to senior members of the Government that a solid quarter of their own Back Benches are determined that the impasse over family policy should be overcome. Signatories, including many noble Lords, are now working to build further support across all parties and in all government departments for policies that will strengthen and help bring stability to families.

As I said during that debate, since 1997, Governments of all colours have fallen short of stated intentions and ignored the elephant in the room of family breakdown, yet the Joseph Rowntree UK Poverty 2017 report published today reiterated the evidence that it is a root cause, as well as an effect, of poverty. It hits the poorest the hardest, compounds existing disadvantage and is a potent driver of wider social breakdown.

I regret that I feel compelled to draw attention to the almost complete lack of funding for family-strengthening policies in the recent Budget Statement. There was one line in the Red Book confirming that there would be a £15 million investment for relationship support and addressing parental conflict in 2018-19 and 2019-20. While this is obviously welcome, there remains a lack of a preventive approach in contrast to other major areas of government policy, particularly education and health, yet the prevalence of fractured and dysfunctional families has significant cost and business implications for all departments of government —therefore, especially for the Treasury. A figure of around £50 billion is often cited as the annual cost of family breakdown, but that inadequately captures the ways that failing families undermine many government priorities such as improvements in productivity. As we say in A Manifesto to Strengthen Families:

“Well-functioning families make a considerable contribution to society: they are wealth generators and vital to our nation’s economic competitiveness. There are very high social and economic costs when families falter, and currently this country is paying a particularly steep price”.


Every department of government needs to recognise that stronger families are potential assets that will reduce their financial outgoings and help them deliver their core business more effectively. Therefore, each one needs to contribute to a broad strategy. The Ministry of Justice, for example, has recently published my review on the need to see prisoners’ family ties as assets for preventing reoffending and reducing intergenerational crime. Its own research has found that prisoners who receive family visits are 39% less likely to reoffend than those who do not. Reoffending costs £15 billion per year but this is just the starting point for the large savings to be made. Each prisoner who “goes straight” will increase productivity, start to contribute to the economy and give his children a much better example to follow.

There is a clear business case for ensuring that policies to strengthen families become embedded in the machinery of government. Investing in this will yield significant benefits, albeit in the medium to long term. The Chancellor is well placed to implement a strategy that will ensure that the foundations—the human building blocks—of our economy are increasingly robust and in a much better condition to meet future challenges.

Leafing through previous Social Mobility Commission reports, I have found a strange silence on the issue of family breakdown. Before the events of this weekend I had—with some sadness and indeed some anger, given that this body is publicly funded to speak truth to power to improve lives—concluded that the commission had taken an ideologically inspired position on family breakdown. To its credit, it paid much attention to the issue of parenting, but almost none to the backdrop that sets the tone in so many households—the relationship between parents. This blindness seemed to me a fatal flaw that would undermine the effectiveness of its wider proposals. Therefore, my first question to my noble friend the Minister is: will the new Social Mobility Commission chair give the full gamut of family factors influencing social mobility the attention bandwidth they deserve, including parental relationship stability and conflict? He or she should know that viewing family-strengthening policies that go beyond cash transfers, childcare and parental leave as off limits for public opinion is mistaken. This is the impasse I referred to previously.

Recent surveys carried out for the Centre for Social Justice challenge the Westminster village assumption that policies to boost family stability will be unpopular. They found that despite the long-term trend of family breakdown in the UK—at least a third of people have directly experienced relationship break-up—support for stronger families, and indeed marriage, remains strong. Almost three-quarters of adults in Britain think that family breakdown,

“is a serious problem … and more should be done to prevent families from breaking up”.

More than 80% of adults think that,

“stronger families and improved parenting”,

are important in “addressing Britain’s social problems”, and almost 90% of new or soon-to-be parents support public money being spent on,

“strengthening families and improving parenting”,

specifically for,

“children growing up in poverty”.

Tackling family breakdown is not toxic. The public are becoming increasingly alive to this issue and the Government must not lag behind.

I submitted a Question for Written Answer asking Her Majesty’s Government whether,

“to strengthen families, they intend to make available funds for projects other than those specified in the Budget Statement”.

My noble friend Lady Buscombe—the Minister—informed me that,

“strengthening families is a cross-government objective and other government departments will be able to confirm their own plans in this area”.

To reiterate, this Budget was almost devoid of funding to tackle family breakdown. Can my noble friend the Minister explain how the Treasury will be proactive in requiring Ministers to meet this cross-government objective, so that we can be more productive, enjoy better well-being and live within our means?