Strengthening Couple Relationships

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) on securing the debate, and I thank all those who contributed. There have been some very interesting points made.

I was particularly keen on some of the practical suggestions made by the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who is the chair of the all-party group on strengthening couple relationships, as he said. Looking at the group’s minutes, I was struck by some of the issues identified, especially by Dr Lester Coleman of the OnePlusOne charity. He emphasised that those who are more engaged at work enjoy a better quality of relationship. That may be because they are more personally fulfilled and more secure in their personal identity, and therefore are better able to give and share. That would seem to be an argument for making it easier for those who wish to work to do so, and is perhaps also an argument for supporting child care, which is a very important part of the Labour party’s policy, especially at a time when the cost of child care is rising so dramatically.

Apparently, parents, as opposed to non-parents, also experience better-quality relationships, and although I would be the first to accept that many contented couples do not have children, that finding suggests to me that we may need to do all we can to support those who wish to be parents. That might include measures such as those that the Government have embarked on to improve adoption. It might mean working harder to broaden the range of people who can adopt and foster. In some cases, it might mean making fertility treatment available to more couples on the NHS.

I also understand that Dr Coleman says that where there is greater work-family conflict, that can have quite a negative impact on the quality of relationships. Of course, that brings to mind all the arguments about making work flexible, so that it fits in with families, and the issue of the living wage, which we comment on from time to time. I am not sure that all of that has received enough attention in the debate so far.

It is perhaps also worth noting that in the YouGov survey commissioned by Relate, to which the hon. Member for Aldershot referred, 59% of respondents were concerned about the strain that money worries were placing on their relationship, which of course is one reason why we on this side of the House take so much time to emphasise the problems of the cost of living at the moment.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

Who is “we”?

[Mr Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Steve McCabe]

I think that I can speak for my side of the House, Mr Streeter. When it comes to strengthening couple relationships, the hon. Member for Aldershot has been clear. He is talking about heterosexual couples. We learned about his views on this issue during the debate on same-sex marriage. He has repeated them honestly today in this debate and in his ePolitix article, in which he states that marriage

“for the majority of Conservative MPs can only be between a man and a woman”.

I do not think that in this day and age it is possible to make such a narrow distinction, because whatever the views of individuals, the law and society are clear: “couple relationships” can mean married, cohabiting, heterosexual and homosexual relationships, however difficult that is for some people to accept. I acknowledge that many people put great store by traditional marriage, but that does not mean that we can deny the reality of what we see around us.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

What the hon. Gentleman has heard throughout this debate, though, is that all the evidence has shown that cohabiting couple households—I am referring to the statistics relating to family disorder, the breakdown of family life and so on—are much more akin to single-parent households than to married couple households. No one is saying that people have to live that lifestyle, but the facts suggest to us that there is one lifestyle in this country that is likely to produce a happier outcome and is better for children, and that is marriage. His right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), a former Secretary of State for the Home Department, said that himself, so why cannot the hon. Gentleman accept it?

[Steve McCabe]

As a divorcé, I do not feel that my divorce has prevented me from being able to have a further solid relationship; nor has it prevented me from having a strong parental role or from being part of a family.

It is interesting that the Government’s most explicit policy to support marriage, the married couple’s tax allowance—we heard quite a lot about that from the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh)—is available only to one third of married couples. The proposals are really designed for the situation in which one partner does not work outside the home or earns very little. It is really a policy for stay-at-home mums, which is perhaps slightly at odds with some of Dr Coleman’s suggestions. Of course, it is available only for married mums, not for widows, cohabiting mums or anyone like that. Perhaps most astonishingly of all, it is available for the love rat who deserts his wife and family and runs off with someone else’s wife. He can remarry and claim the allowance. That strikes me as a slightly perverse way of strengthening couple relationships.

The other thing that is slightly strange about the policy is that it applies to only 4 million of the 12.3 million married couples, and it is not clear what impact it will have on children, given that pensioner families make up more than one third of the beneficiaries. In fact, only 35% of the 30% of families who gain from the policy have children, and only 17% have children under the age of five. It is hardly a well targeted policy if its aim is to support the concerns raised by the hon. Gentleman.

[Andrew Selous]

I want to draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the international facts. If we look across the OECD, we see that the UK is very much an exception in not recognising marriage at all in the tax system. In fact, it is really just us and Mexico alone among all the OECD countries that do not recognise it; 80% of the population of OECD countries live under a system in which marriage is recognised.

[Steve McCabe]

I was talking about the efficacy of a particular measure. Despite the doom and gloom, if we accept that not all relationships come in the form that the hon. Member for Aldershot would like to see—I accept that that is his view, and I understand that he holds it sincerely—the Relate survey to which I referred has some interesting observations. Let me pay tribute to the comments by the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) about Relate. I agree: I think that it is an excellent organisation that we should protect. The Relate survey paints a slightly rosier picture. It found that 93% of people said that, when times were hard, relationships within their family were important. Although the media sometimes presents our society as one in which family relationships have broken down, Relate could not find evidence that that was the case overall. According to its survey, families—albeit sometimes new families or reconstituted families—remain the backbone of our support systems.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Timpson]

It is remiss of me not to have directed similar praise to you, Mr Streeter, and I concur with the words that have just come in your direction.

The Government have commissioned two key pieces of work that will inform future policy makers and commissioners, because problems often start with poor commissioning decisions. That will help in areas such as Mid Derbyshire that want to move away from short-term, spot-purchasing solutions towards something more sustainable. Those two key pieces of work are an independent evaluation of relationship support interventions and a cross-government review of the family stability indicator of the social justice strategy.

Although significant evidence points to the importance of the quality of adult couple relationships to child outcomes, we know from various reviews of literature that there is limited evidence from within the UK about which relationship support practice has the most positive impact on adult and child outcomes. My Department has consequently commissioned research to test the effectiveness of several relationship support interventions, some of which we have already heard about—“Let’s Stick Together”, which my hon. Friends the Members for Congleton and for South West Bedfordshire have mentioned, as well as marriage preparation and couple counselling—to evaluate whether they are as effective as we would like. That report is due at the end of the month.

[Steve McCabe]

Does the Minister agree that it would be wrong of us to conclude the debate without acknowledging that figures released today show that the divorce rate in this country is falling, not rising?

[Mr Timpson]

It would be remiss of anyone not to welcome a fall in the divorce rate, but the fact is that it is still far too high. That is why our emphasis is on working with couples at the earliest opportunity so that they never have to reach that stage in their relationship.

The debate has been informative, passionate and serious. Although the Government have done a lot of work in this area, we recognise that there is still work to do, not only on the ground to improve relationship support, but in the messages that come from Government about how we build strong relationships across society. The past 50 years have seen a seismic shift in the structure and composition of families in this country. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot rightly acknowledged, we should respect many of the reasons why that has happened, but we cannot accept the erosion of marriage and the many well evidenced benefits that it brings to society. That is why the Government are committed to supporting marriage. The marriage tax break is a step in the right direction that will help to ensure that all the attributes marriage brings with it flourish and do not wither.