Affinities welcomes Conservative plan for an index of family and social cohesion

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Wednesday, 11, Jul 2007 12:00

Affinities comments, “Labour is up to its neck in judgmentalism over family structure”

We welcome the Conservative plan for an index of family and social cohesion from Iain Duncan Smith’s Social Justice Policy Group:

“A new statistical index of family and social cohesion ……. Such an index would make individual local authorities accountable for addressing family breakdown in their boroughs.”

Their report points out:

“In 1998, the government consultation paper Supporting Families proposed a range of measures to strengthen marriages and families (such as wider roles for registrars in the provision of marriage preparation and information) but nine years later, very little government policy is directly preventative of family breakdown and lone parent family formation has, over the last quarter century, consistently increased by 40,000 families per year.”

The report backs up the proposal for an index with an excellent idea for extending the role of the commissioner for parenting services:

“Robust local government support of relationship and parenting education - Just as local authorities must have a single commissioner responsible for assessing need and co-ordinating delivery of services to parents, a senior ‘champion’ should also be similarly responsible for relationship education (with the same degree of importance placed on that aspect of their role).”

With the index in place to measure the effectiveness of local authority performance, it would soon be possible to see which local authorities are being successful in improving family and social cohesion and outcomes for children.

Gordon Brown repeated over and over again that he refused to make judgments about people’s family arrangements. (BBC Today programme 11th July 2007).

But how can this possibly be a genuine claim, with all the emphasis there is - including local authority league tables - to deter teenage pregnancy and motherhood? A judgment has been made that HMG doesn't approve of that family arrangement. It is up to its neck in judgmentalism.

If HMG doesn't want teenagers to be parents because the outcomes for the children are generally poor, why cannot it acknowledge also that the outcomes for children of unmarried parents are closer to those of children of teenage mothers than they are to those of children of married parents?

If it is the outcomes for children that are the determining factor in government policy - rather than the relationship of the parents - surely it would be equally wise to deter adults generally from unmarried parenthood as it is to deter teenagers?

Or is it less to do with the outcomes for children than the outcomes of elections that determine Labour’s view of the importance of family arrangements?