Love Matters (Archbishops’ Commission on Families and Households Report)

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury is to be congratulated on securing this debate and allowing us to explore the different aspects of this very important report, which we have all now had time to read. I found myself initially thinking that this is such a statement of what we must surely all want that it felt like it lacked a bit of grit and edge. When I got to the chapters on “Every Child Matters” and the life we live, some of that was corrected and I was able to form a more rounded judgment of the report as a whole.

Noble Lords have already covered much of the ground that I had sought to establish in my remarks, so I will observe the strict self-discipline of not going where others have already trodden. I will also endeavour not to fulfil the stereotype of the Methodist preacher who preaches very long sermons, in the hope that I may not speak for quite as long as one or two who have spoken already—time will tell.

The most reverend Primate has made ample reference to the Beveridge report and its provisions, and quite rightly. A pub quiz question which I put to many people in Parliament and other places is: if the welfare state consists of the implementation of the recommendations of Beveridge and covers six areas of our national life, with perhaps the Butler Education Act at its beginning and the health Act at its end, who can name the other four, and the person who directed them through our Parliament? That question stymies most people—I can see bewilderment on bishops’ faces even now. No—the most reverend Primate and I will talk about it later.

The person who put four Acts of Parliament on the statute book was Jim Griffiths, who was our Member of Parliament in Llanelli and who lived in Burry Port, where I come from. He began his life in the mines, worked his way up to be head of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, and went to the miners’ college in London long before he entered politics, because he thought he had something to say only once he had done all that. He then showed the most humane way, leading a debate here in this House—because at this time the Commons was sitting here—daring to ask the Government in time of war to debate the provisions of the Beveridge Act in March 1943 and to promise to undertake to implement its provisions once the war was over. I am very proud to come from a stable that produced such a man.

I will give just one little illustration from my early life of where those considerations played a very real part. I was raised in a single-parent family; like the most reverend Primate, I discovered late in life that the man I thought was my father was not my father. For all that, we—my mother and two boys—were thrown out of the family home. We lived in one room, a lean-to in a brickyard. If it were not for school meals, I would not have eaten meat until I was well into my teens.

The incident I wish to recount because of its illustrative value is the visit of a man from the National Assistance Board—I should have said that the four Acts we are talking about were National Assistance, Family Allowances, injuries at work and National Insurance Acts. We were visited by a man with a briefcase, wearing a suit, in our humble little abode, who wanted to question my mother as to whether she was entitled to benefits. She had suffered irreversible injuries carrying sheets of steel from one part of a tin-plating process to another in the local factory until it broke her body, and she could barely stand after that. This man’s questioning of my poor mother as to whether she was entitled to benefits and whether she should not make herself fit for work, was what a 10 year-old and 11 year-old boy could not tolerate any longer. With a wink exchanged between me and my brother, we set upon that man: we hit him, beat him and threw him out of the home. That has remained: it satisfied all of my pugilistic needs for the rest of my life—the antidote is still being played out.

For all that, I learned what threatens families from the side of officialdom. Again and again through my ministry, I have stood by claimants in offices that purport to be there to help people along, where, frankly, the atmosphere is foetid and the humiliation of the person making an application is total. That is what it did to my mother. I have learned that sweet talk about families, even when they seek to be good families, is sometimes threatened by external—and systemic—forces, very often imposed by people like us sitting in places like this. That was the first thing: a bit of grit that was stimulated by my reading of this report.

We fast forward a little now to my time as a minister in Essex. On Friday evening it was my job as an officer in the Boys’ Brigade to look after what are called the “anchor boys”—the tiny tots—between five and seven. So, every Friday, between 5 pm and 7 pm, there I was. I soon became aware of something transactional happening in those sessions. The mothers of the children would bring the boys, but the fathers would fetch them. It was considered to be a safe place in broken families where the children living at home during the week with their mothers could be handed over to their fathers. Therefore, in days when the Church has suffered more than most with all the stuff to do with safeguarding over the years, it was a marvellous thing to have that trust placed in one. But it also made me aware of the pressures under which families live, and under which they are broken. It is true that the housing shortage that we are currently going through was not, even in those post-war years, the problem it is today. How can even the highest-minded parent bring up children in the squalid conditions and under the inhumane provisions that are currently in force? I learned lessons about the pressures on families that way.

Finally—to fulfil my self-fulfilling prophecy here—mention has been made of long marriages: I heard 56 and 54. Well, we are at 55—yes, the same woman. We had three children and had the very happiest of times with them. The boys were born in Haiti, with Haitian doctors and nurses and in a Haitian hospital, with Haitian people in a similar condition alongside them. We had a fabulous time. All my three children can tell you the French word for a Jerusalem artichoke and all of them can sing the Welsh national anthem. But, curiously, despite all that was positive, two of my three children are on their second marriage. I will not recount chapter and verse, but I will say that, even in the best of circumstances and to the best people with happy memories, bad things happen. So it is important, in looking at the family and recognising that it matters, and at the place of love in helping to form the cement for that, for us never to forget that there but for the grace of God go any one of us, and that from one moment to another, things happen. We must therefore not feel that even the worthiest of recommendations we can produce will solve the problems we face easily.

A Methodist minister sits down after 10 and a half minutes and hopes to be commended for it.