Fiona
Bruce MP welcomes planned Let’s Stick Together course in Congleton Constituency
Fiona is
delighted the Let’s Stick Together programme in Congleton has secured funding.
The
Let’s Stick Together Programme operates under the umbrella of Care for the
Family, a charity committed to strengthening families and relationships. A pilot for Care’s Let’s Stick Together
programme was recently funded by the Department of Education and was piloted in
three local authority areas. It seeks to
address the fact that the levels of family breakdown can be reduced with early
intervention and small changes in behaviour – through help and advice to
mothers and fathers of young children.
Funding has now
been approved by Cheshire East Council for a Let’s Stick Together Programme for
couples to be launched and operated (by volunteers) in the Congleton Area.
Fiona Bruce MP said “Research
suggests that one in three cohabiting couples split up before their child’s
fifth birthday and Care for the Family are seeking to address this issue. They have concluded that it is rare nowadays
for new parents, despite excellent pre and ante-natal care for their child, to
be advised, however obvious it may seem, that a new arrival can put on strain
on their relationship and that there is a need for greater support for new
parents in these times particularly when so many do not have a family support
network roundabout. That is why I am so pleased that a Let’s Stick Together
Programme here in Congleton, something I have campaigned for both in Parliament
and Congleton, where it can do good helping couples stay together for the
benefit of themselves, their children and their community as a whole I pay
tribute to Carolyn McQuaker, the faith representative for The Children’s Trust,
for pursuing this project.”
Speaking in the House of
Commons as Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Strengthening
Couple Relationships (full speech attached), Fiona Bruce said “My simple and unapologetic message is that, for children,
what matters is that relationships that are safe, stable and nurturing… The
three dimensions of safety, stability and nurture are all important aspects of
the social and physical environments that protect children and are indispensable
to their fulfilling their potential.”
Fiona
met with Carolyn McQuaker last week, faith representative on The Children’s
Trust in Cheshire, who, with Fiona, promoted the campaign for funding for Let’s
Stick Together sessions in Cheshire.
Carolyn McQuaker said “This
funding will help us to set up and train teams to deliver these important
courses in Congleton and across the Borough.”
The Minister can be justly proud of the Government’s progress in a number of ways, including: raising the care leaving age for young people who are fostered, acknowledging that ongoing relationships with foster parents can be incredibly redemptive for children whose birth families have been unable to raise them; transforming the adoption landscape, so that heroic adoptive parents get the support that they need, making it far more likely that they can provide a stable, loving family and that the adoption is as successful as possible; building on the existing evidence-based programme and approaches that help couples to strengthen their relationships and prevent family breakdown; and investing in parent-child relationships by launching the CANparent scheme, providing vouchers for free parenting classes in three trial areas.
The coalition must also be congratulated on recognising marriage in the tax system, acknowledging the greater stability of marriage. Unmarried couples with children are at least twice as likely to split up as those who are married, regardless of income. Furthermore, the Government established a cross-cutting Cabinet Committee on social justice—which rightly treats family breakdown as a driver and not simply as an effect of poverty—and appointed the Department for Work and Pensions as lead Ministry on the issue, to bring all relationship support policy under one Department. I also thank the Prime Minister for his speech in August this year in support of strong families.
I could go on, but I want to leave plenty of time to explain why relationships matter so much to children’s well-being and to make it clear that while that is a great start, it is only a start. The agenda has to be seen as a journey with a long distance left to run. It is like a ship that has finally set sail and edged out of the mouth of the harbour, but is still a long way from achieving its purpose in setting forth. What is that purpose? The over-riding priority for family policy has to be to tackle our epidemic levels of family breakdown in this country.
With the exception of our Prime Minister and a few others, some of whom are present—I acknowledge the support of Members attending the debate—politicians often hold back from talking up the benefits of marriage and committed relationships. They worry that by emphasising the need to support and encourage such relationships they will be seen as judgmental or moralising, or as adopting a “nanny state” approach. The costs of family breakdown, however, are enormous; at £48 billion, they exceed the defence budget. Surely it
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that tackles the issue—not my words, but a quotation from the conclusion reached by the Centre for Social Justice in its July 2014 Breakthrough Britain report, “Fully Committed? How a Government could reverse family breakdown”.
The CSJ has probably done more than any other organisation to put the issue on to the policy agenda. I pay tribute to the CSJ, to the leadership of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), now the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, for founding the organisation and inspiring so much of its work, and to the excellent work of Dr Samantha Callan.
The CSJ report states:
“Strong and stable relationships and
families are indispensable to a strong and stable society. Secure, nurturing,
loving and reliable family environments are crucial for the health and
wellbeing of children, adults, and wider communities, and where these factors
are absent this can have a profoundly damaging effect on the fabric of society.
Yet for almost half a century there has been an escalation in family breakdown
across Britain—divorce and separation, dysfunction and dadlessness.”
The report
and the statistics speak volumes about why we have no grounds for complacency
in this country. For example, by the time that children are sitting their
GCSEs, nearly half of them live in broken homes. That proportion rises to two
thirds for those in low-income communities, and we must highlight the fact that
it is the poorest who are hit hardest by family breakdown. Almost half of all
children under five in our poorest households are not living with both their
parents, which is seven times the number of those in the richest households.
One statistic in particular brought home to me the distorted priorities in our
society: more teenagers have a smartphone than have a father at home.We are known as the single parent capital of Europe, with one quarter of families with children headed by lone parents. That figure rises significantly in our poorest neighbourhoods and can be as high as 75%. Other countries are doing much better. In Finland, more than 95% of children under 15 live with both parents, and the OECD average is 84%. Many parents raising children on their own are doing an amazing job against the odds, but few set out to do that—it is rarely a lifestyle choice. They find it incredibly difficult and they do not want their children to be in the same position when they are older.
Why does stability matter so much for children? Surely the most important thing is that they are safe? Surely if a relationship is no longer loving and nurturing for the adults and children involved, it is time to call it a day. Campaigners against domestic abuse often argue against an emphasis on stability, on the grounds that violent and controlling relationships should not be stable and need to end. I will explain why, however, it is overly simplistic to pit safety against stability.
Not for one minute am I saying that a partner who is being subjugated or suffering significant and severe abuse should be under any societal or economic pressure to remain in an exploitative relationship. Nor am I saying that the poor status quo of low-quality relationships, even where there is no abuse, should simply be endured because of an ideological emphasis on stability. Relationship education, support, counselling and therapy represent a spectrum of help for those who do not want their
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relationship to end, but deeply want it to improve. That is why this and future Governments need to keep investing in effective programmes and research on what works.
Parents’ desire to stay together is often rooted in their awareness that relationship breakdown profoundly affects children. Children whose family splits are more likely to experience behavioural problems, to underachieve in school, to need more medical treatment, to leave school and home earlier, to become sexually active, pregnant or a parent at an early age, and to have poorer mental health and higher levels of smoking, drinking and other drug use during adolescence.
That is explored in another report, which was produced last month by a number of parliamentarians. I was privileged to be involved, under the leadership of my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), who I am pleased to see present today. That important report, “Holding the Centre: Social stability and Social capital”, which I hope the Minister will read, if he has not already received a copy, states that social capital is the wealth of our nation:
“While economic recovery is an essential
foundation, it is not enough. Debt burdens, housing costs, worries about social
care, and lack of confidence that all will share the fruits of domestic hard graft
and global competitiveness weigh heavily. Fractured relationships are both a
cause and consequence of these issues.
Strong communities and extended families
can build both financial and social capital, increasing wellbeing and reducing
long-term pressures on public spending. Every department of the government
should therefore be crystal clear about the extent to which it relies on family
and community relationships and the costs of that contribution being
compromised.”
The report
welcomes the Prime Minister’s announcement of a “triple test” for family
policy, so that
“every government department will be held
to account for the impact of their policies on the family”,
and it
states:
“He is right to say that ‘whatever the
social issue we want to grasp—the answer should always begin with family’.”
The report
highlights the Prime Minister’s comment thatIt makes a number of recommendations that, as I have said, I hope the Minister will look at and will respond to in his speech.
My simple and unapologetic message is that, for children, what matters is a trinity: relationships that are safe, stable and nurturing. The United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the equivalent of Public Health England, treats safe, stable and nurturing relationships—or SSNRs, in our acronym-prone world—as one of the essentials for childhood. It states:
“Safe, stable, nurturing
relationships…between children and their caregivers…are fundamental to healthy
brain development”
and
“shape the development of children’s
physical, emotional, social, behavioral, and intellectual capacities”,
all of which
ultimately affect the whole of their lives as adults. Children’s mental health
rests largely on their benefiting from safe, stable and nurturing
relationships. The three dimensions of safety, stability and nurture are all important aspects of the social and physical environments that protect children and are indispensible to their fulfilling their potential. Safety is the extent to
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which a child is free from fear and secure from physical or psychological harm. Stability is about the degree of predictability and consistency in a child’s environment—including consistency in the people to whom children relate—as well as how they interact with caregivers and others.
Stability gives a child a sense of coherence and enables them to see the world as predictable and manageable. Without it, they may not form the secure and nurturing attachments they need for optimal development. Moreover, if the adults around them are not in stable relationships, it can make it more likely that a child will be exposed to relationships and environments that are stressful and unsafe. Many stepfathers are incredibly caring and conscientious, but sometimes living with unrelated males is a significant risk factor for child maltreatment, as in the baby Peter tragedy and many other serious child abuse cases.
Nurture concerns the extent to which a parent or carer is attuned and responding to the physical, developmental and emotional needs of their child. Nurturing relationships make a child feel safer and able to embrace new situations and explore their world with confidence. I should say that it is not one-way: one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life has been nurturing and bringing up two boys, who are now aged 18 and 21. Safety, stability and nurture overlap, and all matter. Children are more likely to grow up with all of them if their parents’ relationship is intact and high in quality.
In a worrying situation, over the past few days and weeks, world leaders and national Governments have been calling other countries to account over their lack of action on the Ebola outbreak. The scale of such a challenge requires all the wealthy nations of the world to plough in significant resources and make a sacrificial effort. Small gestures will not stem the tide. I would argue that exactly the same can be said about stemming the tide of family breakdown.
Evidence from the Healthy Marriage Initiative in the United States shows that those states that put a significant amount of resource into the poorest communities saw correspondingly significant increases in children growing up with both their parents and declines in child poverty. The states that did not had far less to show for their efforts. Our Government’s own research has already shown that Relate’s couple counselling and Marriage Care’s marriage preparation courses show a more than elevenfold return on investment through savings due to reduced relationship breakdown—that is, for every £1 invested, over £11 is returned to society. Courses such as those show that relationship skills can be learned. We need more of them in our society, in which so many people—particularly young people—embark on relationships with no role model for how to sustain a healthy relationship over time.
I am reminded of a discussion I had with a colleague in my law firm. It had become clear to me that our family department was advising on divorces for couples in shorter and shorter relationships. I asked the head of the department, “What is the shortest marriage that you have advised on now?” He turned to me and said, “The couple did not even end their reception. They had a row
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during the reception and came to us for a divorce.” Does that not highlight a lack of understanding of what commitment means, certainly in a marriage?
I welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment not to allow funding for relationship support to drop below the current level as long as he is in post. But that level is meagre in comparison to the scale of need: it is just 0.02% of the cost of family breakdown. I understand that public finances are tight and that there is concern that the evidence base for effective programmes and approaches is still slender. However, surely the answer is to build on that base. Sir Graham Hart urged the previous Government to do that in the review of relationship support they commissioned him to undertake in the late 1990s. It is important to note that this is a cross-party issue. It concerns colleagues right across the political spectrum and should be above and beyond party politics. Any Government, of whatever colour, should treat it as a priority.
Relationship science is a growing and respected field of research in the US. One of its foremost proponents, Professor Scott Stanley, argues that we know enough to take action and we need to take action to know more. We have already learned a lot about what works in helping and supporting couples, but we need to keep on learning and improving all the time. Evidence matters enormously, so I am delighted that this Government have recently conducted their own family stability review. It is essential that the findings of the review are published soon, for the benefit of local authorities and commissioners of services.
We also need a “What Works” centre for families and relationships—not a vastly expensive proposition considering its potential return: the Early Intervention Foundation was set up at a cost of £3.5 million and is already making a huge contribution to local authority decision making. A What Works centre would help enormously in refining a curriculum for relationships education in school. It is critical that relationships are the priority in relationships and sex education in schools. There is hardly a person I know who does not agree with that. The subject should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum, drawing in local relationship support organisations as well as specialist teachers. Last week’s heated media discussions over the footballer Ched Evans’s rape conviction show how vital it is for all young people to understand issues such as consent, equality and respect in relationships, as well as commitment and the importance of enduring relationships.
We also need children’s centres in every community to evolve into family hubs where parents can get help with their own relationships, not just with parenting. Although all this help and support has to be delivered at a local level, it is essential that the policy agenda is championed nationally, otherwise it will have no hope of competing for time, money and attention in an already impossibly crowded set of priorities. Although I am aware that individual Opposition Members are extremely concerned about this issue, I am disappointed that apart from the shadow Minister there is only one Member on the Opposition Benches today, from the Democratic Unionist party, the hon. Member for South Antrim (Dr McCrea).
As chair of the all-party group for strengthening couple relationships, I had the privilege of hosting the launch yesterday, here in the House of Commons, of
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the Relationships Alliance’s excellent manifesto. That manifesto makes some excellent practical suggestions, including calling for a Cabinet-level Minister for Families with a properly resourced Whitehall Department. That would greatly help to ensure that the recently introduced family test for public policy is meaningful.
The manifesto has 12 points intended to challenge Government and promote cultural change. They include the suggestion that all front-line practitioners delivering public services should receive training on relationship support; that family and relationship centres should be piloted and established in the UK, as in Australia, where the Government have made a 20-year commitment to addressing the issue; that central Government should engage local authorities to develop and extend relationship support at local level; and that both local and central Government should ensure that services are designed to help at life transition points, so as to include a focus on couple, family and social relationships. Lastly, although there are other recommendations I have not mentioned, the manifesto says:
“The expanded Troubled Families programme
should include a focus on supporting and measuring the quality and stability of
couple, family and social relationships.”
I
acknowledge, and pay tribute to, the four organisations involved in producing
the manifesto: the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, Marriage Care,
Relate and OnePlusOne.To conclude, the Minister will agree that there is no shortage of ideas. In my brief speech, I have referred to three substantial reports on this subject, issued in almost as many months this summer and autumn. The challenges are huge, but they must be addressed—whatever the colour of the next Government, and by us all. The Relationships Manifesto states:
“Clearly, government…can only go so far,
and it requires collective action from citizens, business, civil society and
government to create the condition for people’s relationships to flourish.”
I urge this
Government to grasp the nettle of family breakdown more firmly than has been
the case before. That will immeasurably help this and future generations of
parents to massively boost their children’s life chances, enabling them to face
the future full of hope, to reach their potential, and to be fully confident
that they are loved and that they matter. As the CSJ’s report says,
“Without concerted action across
government and beyond to address our epidemic levels of family breakdown there
is a danger that the agenda will be lost”,
and it
is the children in our society who will pay the highest price.
