Strengthening Couple Relationships

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I want to set the scene first, because the problem is of such magnitude that it is important to put the facts on the record. I will admit to him that I am light in the department of what the solutions are, but he will not be surprised to hear that I have some advice for the bishops. I know, however, that my hon. Friends are doing good work in this field.

I was drawing attention to an article in yesterday’s Daily Mail. Some people will say that it refers to an extreme example, which it may be, but it reflects on a smaller scale what is going on right across the nation. I regularly deal with broken family cases at my surgeries. One constituent recently told me that the father of her child walked out the day she went into labour and has not been seen since, although he boasts on Facebook that he has paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash for a London flat. Another told me that the father, who smokes a lot of weed, has not seen the children for two years; he has a child by another woman and is now with a third woman. A third constituent told me that she is expecting a child by a man who is not interested and has no job; he himself was placed in care as a child. This is going on all over the country. I am not talking about a deprived inner-city area. This is Aldershot, Hampshire. If it is happening there, imagine what else is happening in some of our inner cities.

The men who father these children seem to have absolutely no interest in bringing them up, let alone paying for them. It is important that we recognise that we cannot afford to continue to subsidise people who live such dysfunctional lifestyles. We do not have the money. It is immoral, it is wrong and it has to stop. Am I being judgmental in an age when such an approach is deemed inappropriate? Of course I am being judgmental. For the sake of our country, we need to be judgmental. Besides, plenty of people never cease to be judgmental about Members of Parliament.

Let me move from the particular to the general. Let us consider the data. According to the Centre for Social Justice—an excellent organisation—more than 3 million children are growing up in a lone parent household, 92% headed by the mother. Does that matter? I submit that it does matter because the evidence shows that

“marriage provides the most reliable framework for raising children.”

Those are not my words, but those of the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), the former Home Secretary, in his 1998 consultation document entitled “Supporting Families”. That view was essentially reiterated by this Government when, in their social justice strategy paper published in March 2012, they said that

“this Government believes marriage often provides an excellent environment in which to bring up children. So the Government is clear that marriage should be supported and encouraged.”

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. His point about dadlessness is important. The lifelong impact on dadless children’s educational achievement and job prospects, among other things, is immense, but does he accept that children sometimes grow up in dadless households because dads who want to be there have been excluded? The purpose of the presumption of shared parenting in the Children and Families Bill, which is going through Parliament now, is to ensure that, wherever possible, those dads who are unable to live with their children because of an acrimonious split continue to have whatever meaningful and valuable contact they have with their children because of the huge value that it brings to the experience of the children.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. It is not one that I intended to cover in my speech, but I am glad that he has put that on the record, because it is clear that there are fathers who do want access to their children and who do want to play an important role in bringing up their children, but they are denied. I hope that the Children and Families Bill will be a move in the right direction to rectify that wrong.

Let me be clear that the problem is not just about the financial cost, massive though that is. As all right hon. and hon. Members are only too aware from their surgeries, there is a massive social cost in human misery, which has an undeniably detrimental effect on children, as my hon. Friend has just illustrated. Statistics show that children of separated parents are more likely to have physical and mental health problems in childhood and to fall into crime or substance abuse in later life. The Centre for Social Justice observes that lone parents are two and a half times more likely to be in poverty than couple families, and children from broken homes are statistically less likely to be able to establish stable relationships themselves, thereby continuing the cycle.

Research by the Office for National Statistics on “The mental health of children and adolescents in Great Britain”, published in 2000, found twice the incidence of disorders in boys aged 11 to 15 in lone-parent households as in married households. Even more interesting, the incidence in cohabiting households was similar not to that in married households, but rather to that in lone-parent households. I shall have more to say on cohabitation in a moment, but clearly one has to recognise that although not all children brought up in such conditions will necessarily struggle in those ways, we cannot ignore the facts if we are to tackle the issue. According to Relate, another excellent organisation, the number of families with dependent children increased by 5% between 1996 and 2012. The number of married-couple families with dependent children fell by 12%, however, and the number of lone-parent families rose by 22% and the number of cohabiting couples doubled. One million fathers do not live with their children.

Marriage, which for the majority of Conservative Members of Parliament can be only between a man and a woman, remains the core of a stable family. Only in this environment do children have both male and female role models for guidance and support. However, the number of marriages has fallen from about 415,000 in 1970 to about 240,000 in 2010, a near 100-year low. The number of single-parent households has risen from 8% of the total in 1970 to 22% in 2010. Since the late 1970s, there has been a steady increase in the rise of cohabitation, with nearly half of all children today born outside marriage, but cohabitation is a relatively unstable substitute for marriage. Figures from the Centre for Social Justice show that fewer than one in 10 married couples separate by their child’s fifth birthday, compared with one in three cohabiting couples.

Many of us welcomed the Government’s acknowledgement of the contribution that marriage makes to a strong society when the Chancellor included a tax break for married couples in his autumn statement. At this point, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who led the campaign on that front, but it can only be the start. I agree wholeheartedly with the Christian Institute that

“most marriages last for life… Children need a father and a mother to nurture them... Children need parents who love them and love each other just as much. That love must be a permanent and not a temporary commitment… The best environment for raising children is marriage because the spouses have committed themselves to each other, and thus their children, for life. No other kind of relationship provides this environment of stability and permanence for children. Social science confirms that lifelong and loving marriage is the ideal context in which to raise children.”

Some say that in a free society, people should be entitled to live any lifestyle that they want and to an extent that is unquestionably true. I am conscious that I am trespassing on delicate territory, as we are all touched in one way or another by such trends, even at the highest levels in our land, but overwhelmingly it is the taxpayer who is picking up the tab for the current state of affairs, so the state cannot be an idle bystander.