Reducing Parental Conflict

Lord Palmer of Childs Hill Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

It certainly remains work in progress. As the noble Baroness said, the reducing parental conflict programme was initiated in 2017 in response to two key pieces of evidence, one of which was the number of children who live in coupled families reporting conflict, which in 2020 was as much as 12%. We have three further evaluation reports coming out. They are enormous—I have seen them. This granular detail will be coming out shortly. It shows, for example, that 90% of those parents who have gone through it have a satisfaction rate, meaning that there is already some valuable information about its success.

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, I am not reassured by what the Minister said about how this is being rolled out. Is there adequate support for people without easy access to digital services? We seem to have an academic exercise. The Minister said it is being rolled out through local authorities. He will know that most local authorities have straitened financial circumstances at the moment. Does the Minister have evidence that they are actually doing something to give face-to-face support to families with these problems?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Very much so. The noble Lord may know that we had a first challenge fund, and we now have a second challenge fund with eight interesting initiatives as part of RPC. For example, one of the challenge funds is looking at the digital side. This has a particular focus on ensuring that those who are not particularly digitally aware can be. The results of that will come out in due course, but I hope that answers directly the noble Lord’s question.