Serious Violence Strategy

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 11th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I too welcome the Government’s Serious Violence Strategy and the opportunity to debate it. Importantly, the strategy commits to tackling the deeply troubling trends which the Minister and others have outlined, by establishing a new balance between prevention and law enforcement. However, it will be greatly hampered in its effectiveness by the lack of an equally—if not even more necessary—strategy to address the veritable tsunami of family breakdown that has engulfed many of our communities. This has direct links to the violence, as I will make clear.

As the Centre for Social Justice, which has helped me with data for this speech, has repeatedly emphasised, we have one of the highest rates of family breakdown in the OECD. Just two-thirds of all children aged between 0 and 14 years live with both their birth parents. According to the Office for National Statistics, a quarter of families in the UK are headed by a lone parent, and 86% of these are headed by mothers. Some 2.7 million children have no father figure at home; more than 1 million children have little or no contact with their birth father, and 15% of the UK’s children grow up without a resident father.

The Serious Violence Strategy does hint at an understanding of these issues by euphemistically referring to “disrupted family environments” and describing the need for parents of troubled young people to be taught,

“strategies for improving the quality of their interactions with their child, reducing negative child behaviour and increasing their efficacy and confidence in parenting”.

Yet there is no recognition that often the parents in question are women on their own raising violent and out-of-control sons, who have far superior physical strength, with the fathers long gone. We are so frightened of appearing to be critical of lone parents that we forget what a difficult and gruelling job it is to do single-handedly. Many did not choose it as a lifestyle, do not enjoy it and certainly do not want their children to repeat the cycle.

Moreover, although the strategy treats family socioeconomic status as a risk factor, it does not fully reflect the evidence linking fatherlessness with criminal and gang activity. Fatherlessness is a well-documented risk factor for offending, and the risk factors for gang involvement are similar to those for offending. While, of course, not all serious violence is perpetrated by gangs, it should not be forgotten that, for a significant group of young people growing up in our most deprived communities, the gang has become a substitute family, with the gang leader as the father: 17 year-old André, who used to be gang-involved, told the Centre for Social Justice, “You can go out and be in that crew and have a family”.

Let me outline some of the characteristics of many boys growing up with physically or emotionally absent fathers. The rejection and inadequacy they feel as a result of growing up in a fatherless household is often internalised, creating resentment and anger. The absence of positive role models of masculinity leaves them with little choice but to learn what it is to be a man from traditional alpha male imagery, and this makes them vulnerable to being groomed for violence and susceptible to exploitation.

In consequence, what might be termed our national father deficit is a driver for criminal and gang activity: 25% of young offenders are already fathers themselves; only 30% of young offenders come from intact families; and boys with little or no involvement with their fathers are twice as likely to become offenders compared to boys with highly involved fathers.

The UK National Survey of Health and Development found that 27% of boys who had experienced separation or divorce had been cautioned or convicted by age 21, compared to 14% of those who had not experienced family breakdown. The Newcastle Thousand Family Study showed that the likelihood of a male being convicted up to age 32 doubles if he has experienced divorce or separation before age five. Drilling down to an individual case which is by no means unusual, an Islington borough police evaluation of one particular London gang murder found that of the 13 young people initially suspected of involvement in the killing, 12 were from lone-parent homes.

My recent review on the importance of family ties to prevent reoffending and the transmission of intergenerational crime in prison has found that two thirds of prisoners’ sons go on to offend. It is obvious that not all fathers—and not all mothers—have a good influence on their children. This is partly to do with the fact that those who grow up without a present father experience other disadvantages that can lead to or increase the risks of criminal behaviour.

Compared to children in two-parent families, children in one-parent families are significantly more likely to smoke, drink and take drugs weekly. Children from low-income households who have an active father figure at home are 25% more likely to escape the poverty they grow up in. According to a 2017 Oxford University study, where there is an active father pre-teen, children are up to 28% less likely to suffer behavioural problems.

When the Serious Violence Strategy was debated recently in the other place, the right honourable Sir Desmond Swayne disagreed with higher police numbers being the solution, saying:

“We would have to swamp the streets with policemen; there would have to be policemen available at every violent incident for it to make that form of difference. We would be back to Cromwell saying, “If I arm one in 10 will that be enough?” Of much more significance in terms of the propensity to violence is the lack of attention to the question of young people—particularly very young people—and parenting. That is where the Government’s efforts must be directed”. —[Official Report, Commons, 22/5/18; col. 739.]


Across the Floor in the other place, the Labour Member, Vicky Foxcroft, stressed:

“We need to start far, far earlier, working with families from birth by providing support such as Sure Start, which works with a child and their family from a pre-school age”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/5/18; col. 771.]


The Serious Violence Strategy mentions that police forces in Wales are giving attention to adverse childhood experiences, and the public health approach to serious violence in Scotland also aims to prevent these ACEs. England might have a little catching up to do here, although crime policy in the devolved Greater Manchester authority is also very ACE-aware. It should be noted that parental separation is also a recognised ACE—adverse childhood experience—but I have not heard about any policies north or west of the border to try to prevent this.

The Serious Violence Strategy did not agree that interventions aimed at pre-school children had the best results and said that some of the most successful programmes were aimed at slightly older children—those who had already offended or shown signs of anti-social behaviour. I passionately believe that every child needs the best possible start in life but the wheels can fall off the family wagon when children are older than five, the age at which much parenting support that is based in Sure Start ceases to be available.

That is why I have been pressing the Government to encourage the evolution of family hubs, often from—and continuing the early years work of—existing Sure Start children’s centres. Councils such as the Isle of Wight, Essex and Westminster are finding that they can reduce disadvantage and dysfunction for all their families by integrating a full range of help, including their troubled families programme, into these community settings. They are somewhere parents can go where someone will have the answers.

The need for family hubs is one of the recommendations of the manifesto to strengthen families that I have talked about before in your Lordships’ House. It also recommends that the Government bring into force Schedule 6 to the Welfare Reform Act 2010 which would make it mandatory for fathers to be named on birth certificates, with all sensible safeguards. There are over 247,000 children under seven in the UK who had no registered father at birth, and every year, one in 20 children is born with no registered father. The manifesto also recommended moving birth registration into children’s centres and family hubs, so that both mothers and fathers can see from the outset what kind of support would be there for them if they need it.

Finally, but most instrumentally, the manifesto calls for a Cabinet-level family Minister in government. He or she would have the clout of a big department, such as the Home Office or even possibly defence, and would, like the Equalities Minister, have additional responsibility for driving policies to improve family stability and family functioning in every department of government. At the recent reshuffle, a Minister for Loneliness was appointed, yet various academics who have looked at statistics from studies going back to the 1940s, dispute claims that there is an epidemic of loneliness in contrast with the past. Professor Barreto, of Exeter University, quoted in the Times last week, said:

“Perhaps what we see is an epidemic of understanding, of interest in loneliness and an urge to try and understand what can be done about it. But we aren’t more lonely than before”.


Since studies began the prevalence of loneliness has hardly changed. The same thing simply cannot be said about the prevalence of family breakdown.

Can the Minister provide an update please on the progress in these three areas: holding men’s feet to the fire when they father a child, through mandatory birth registration; moving this process into places which could help put parents on to a good path from the outset; and giving a senior Cabinet Member overarching responsibility for developing and implementing a strategy to address the genuine epidemic of fractured and dysfunctional families? Support for family relationships, whether between parent and child or between parents themselves, cannot be rejected on the grounds that it is too intrusive for the state to be involved. The Government warn parents about the consequences of overconsumption of sugar, salt, screens, smoking and drinking. Warning them about the long-term personal and societal outcomes of poor parenting and fractured families and putting tools into their hands to enable them to be the good mothers and fathers who most long to be is not the nanny state, but the canny state.