Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill [Lords]

Scott Benton Excerpts

Committee stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 17th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I have now to announce the result of today’s deferred division on the Abortion (Northern Ireland) (No.2) Regulations 2020. The Ayes were 253 and the Noes were 136, so the Question was agreed to.

[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]

[Scott Benton (Blackpool South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), with whose comments I completely agree. The community I represent contains some of the most deprived wards in England, and the magnitude of some of the social challenges in Blackpool is frankly enormous. When I visit our local soup kitchens, or work with community groups who help the most marginalised in society, I speak to many of those who are reaching out for support. There are, of course, a wide variety of different personal circumstances, and a plethora of reasons why people need additional help. It always strikes me, however, that some form of family breakdown usually lies at the heart of it.

The traditional family is a cornerstone of a strong society, and marriage is the glue that holds families together. Marriage creates a stable environment in which children can thrive, and we know that children born to married parents are more likely to go to university, get married themselves, and find long-term employment. Strong families and marriage provide the support and stability that benefits not just the individuals concerned, but society as a whole. Indeed, it is a sad fact that anything we do to weaken the family unit and marriage by making a divorce easier to obtain will result in greater family breakdown, and there will be more people falling on hard times and invariably presenting themselves for support at those community groups and food banks that I visit in my constituency.

The benefits of marriage speak for themselves. There is so much more that I would like to say on this, but I would like to associate myself with the comments made in the excellent speeches on Second Reading by my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) and my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who highlighted many of the points that I would make this afternoon, had I more time.

I have reservations about this Bill and the message that it sends out to society. As a Government, we should be encouraging marriage and supporting the principle of the traditional family. If we introduce compulsory no-fault divorce in a six-month timeframe, the result will inevitably be an increase in the divorce rate and the problems within society that family breakdown creates.

One obvious way of mitigating the impact of the Bill is the provisions in new clause 1, which would ensure increased support for marriages and new support for couples where an application for divorce has been made to the court. Of course, there will be sad occasions when it may not be in the couple’s best interests to stay together, but I am speaking more generally when I say that it is in the national interest for couples to stay together.

Surely it would be an effective use of public funds for the Government to make available grants for marriage support services before marriage and during a marriage—that is, before couples appear before a court seeking a divorce. The estimated cost of family breakdown is £51 billion per year. In stark contrast, the Government’s forecast spending on relationship support in the last financial year was a paltry £10.2 million. So family break- down costs us £51 billion, yet we spend only £10 million trying to fix the source of it. Sadly, I am not sure that will make much of a difference.

A number of Government Members have expressed concerns about the Bill. It would go some way to show the Government’s support for marriage if they were minded to invest in relationship support, counselling and marriage preparation. Those programmes will make a significant difference. The Government’s own commissioned evaluation of relationship support provided in the UK found that counselling and relationship education resulted in statistically significant

“positive changes in individuals’ relationship quality, well-being and communication”,

and that couple counselling and certain types of marriage preparation were

“cost effective, providing substantially greater savings to society than they cost to deliver.”

The Relationships Alliance, a group that includes Relate, has published evidence on why good-quality couple and family relationships matter. In that publication, it stated:

“International evidence, including several randomised control trials, shows that relationship counselling or therapy can be effective in improving relationship quality, relationship satisfaction, conflict resolution skills, and wellbeing and mental health.”

Relationship support really does work, and it is clear that it would make a significant and effective difference. Services offered should be local and able to respond to a couple’s needs within days, especially given the minimum timeframe that the Bill currently specifies. I sincerely hope that the Government will see that the proposal in new clause 1 fits with their key policy objectives on divorce law reform, which include sufficient opportunity for reconciliation, and will therefore ensure that marriage counselling is made available to spouses when an application has been made for divorce.